I’ve been thinking about getting one of these Zepii electric scooters from The London Electric Scooter Company (they’ve just launched their website). You can watch a hands-on review here by Jason Bradbury of the UK’s Gadget Show, when they were first released a year ago. Relatively low carbon footprint. No emissions (if you’re electrical supply is renewable). No road tax. No congestion charges. Costs about £60 in electricity to run a year.
A company called Bloom Energy and founded by K.R. Sridhar is set to launch a new energy device tomorrow that he says is a breakthrough in fuel cell technology — namely making it affordable (the Holy Grail of fuel cell research) and thus providing a localised and comparatively cleaner and cheaper form of electricity than that which we currently get from the grid.
There was a segment covering the topic on CBS’s 60 minutes Sunday night, including an interview with K.R. Sridhar, which can watch online here.
A friend just forwarded this article from 2007 on militarism and global warming. Consider this:
US militarism has to be considered under three headings: First, the US military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the US economy, the largest national consumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of maintaining a supply of fossil fuel for itself is through military action (assault, intervention, occupation of other oil producing nations). Third, the US military operates in the interest of a corporate economy of which it (the military) is the foremost sector in the US.
Monbiot on peak oil and food production: If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling … If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I […]