Kelley Blue Book released its list of the “10 Most Fuel-Efficient Luxury Cars of 2015.”
Ranking is opened by BMW i3 (second year in a row in the # 1 spot), followed by Tesla Model S, Mercedes-Benz B-Class ED, Cadillac ELR and BMW i8. Plug-ins capture the entire Top 5.
BMW i3
Best hybrid is at 6th and with more plug-in models coming, next year plug-ins could take the entire Top 10.
2015 BMW i3
2015 Tesla Model S
2015 Mercedes-Benz B-Class
2014 Cadillac ELR
2015 BMW i8
2015 Lexus CT 200h
2016 Lincoln MKZ Hybrid
2015 Lexus ES 300h
2015 BMW 328d
2016 Audi A3 TDI
About the winner:
“BMW’s i3 tops this list for the second year in a row. This electric 4-door’s design is modern and fresh, and truly stands out on the road. Not only is the i3 the most fuel-efficient luxury car, it’s the most fuel-efficient car, period. Adding a cure for anxiety is an available range-extending gas engine.
Brian Shebairo, the owner of hipster hot dog haven Crif Dogs in Manhattan’s East Village, just made it through Hurricane Sandy’s devastating power outage without closing down. Now he’s sitting on 210 gallons of gas — during a quasi-apocalyptic fuel shortage — in anticipation of another looming crisis: the nor’easter expected Wednesday.
Businesses from Crif Dogs to Goldman Sachs can be considered true business preppers in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (Image: dsgray16/Flickr)
“People looked at me like I’m crazy, but the reality is you never know,” Shebairo told The Huffington Post.
“It sucks to need something and not have it, and it’s pretty awesome to need something and have it. And I’ve had it.”
Shebairo is prepping for the nor’easter just as he did for Sandy, not only with full gas cans, but with heavy duty extension cords, power strips, batteries, chainsaws, bolt cutters, pallets of water and about 10 generators.
“I don’t have a ‘go bag’,” he said. “I have a ‘go truck’.”
Shebairo is what’s known, in certain circles, as a doomsday prepper. And these folks are having something of a moment. Often mocked for fearing a nuclear war or zombie apocalypse, they’ve gotten a bad rap since Chicken Little, but the consequences of not being prepared for Hurricane Sandy has given preppers a credibility boost. Many believe it may draw the prepper movement from the fringe to the mainstream.
It’s the outcome the world wants to avoid, but we are already halfway there. All but one of the main trackers of global surface temperature are now passing more than 1 °C of warming relative to the second half of the 19th century, according to an exclusive analysis done for New Scientist.
2015 is shaping up to be a scorcher (Image: M. Salem/Reuters)
We could also be seeing the end of the much-discussed slowdown in surface warming since 1998, meaning this is just the start of a period of rapid warming.
“There’s a good chance the hiatus is over,”
says Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Last year was the hottest since records began, but only just. With an El Niño now under way – meaning warm surface waters in the Pacific are releasing heat into the atmosphere – and predicted to intensify, it looks as if the global average surface temperature could jump by around 0.1 °C in just one year.
“2015 is shaping up to smash the old record,” says Trenberth.
An article from back in 2012 with an interesting take on Transition versus Prepping
Is the “end” near? If the pop-culture version of the Mayan calendar’s “apocalyptic” predictions turns out to be correct and the world ends on 12/21/12, then you will probably not be reading this blog. The fiscal “cliff” sounds dire, but luckily it is only an annoying metaphor. This latest round of end-of-the-world hysteria is part of an ongoing theme in American culture that includes the 20th century fears of Cold War nuclear Armageddon, the “Y2K” mania leading up to December 31, 1999, Dick Cheney’s obsession in the early 2000s of terrorists with suitcase nukes, and the constant stream of movies and television shows portraying the sudden dramatic end of civilization.
Americans consciously or subconsciously understand that the world as we know it could alter in an instant, and such TV shows provide cathartic relief to that tension. Notable among cable television’s recent boom in “end times” programming is National Geographic Channel’s “Doomsday Preppers.” The show profiles individuals and families as they build bunkers and compounds, can dry goods, and purchase paramilitary vehicles that can serve as mobile homes in which to survive amidst the teeming post-apocalyptic masses. Each “prepper” has their threat of choice, ranging from earthquakes, tidal waves, droughts, and food shortages, to super-volcanoes, nuclear holocaust, viruses, terrorists, and more. The show takes all apocalyptic scenarios seriously and provides an expert to evaluate the prepper’s actions and suggest improvements and additional preparations they can make in the basic categories of water, food, shelter, and security.
Food Storage And Prepping Are So Important (Image: SurvivalistPrepper.net)
To audiences concerned with sustainability and climate change, the show sends mixed messages. On the one hand, most preppers demonstrate an admirable understanding of where their food and water come from, the motivation to design resilient systems, and display actions consistent with basic emergency preparedness. On the other hand, the show tends to highlight the “lifeboat strategy” of saving one’s self, family, and perhaps a few friends, while allowing the rest of society to crash and burn, with an emphasis on guns instead of, say, community gardens.
Where Australia leads – with its large amounts of sunshine – the UK should eventually follow
When Jane Whiltsher used to open her power bill it grated.
“I always felt that I was being ripped off,” she says.
“It’s just the way they operate. It keeps going up and up.”
Two months after having a rooftop solar and battery system installed, it’s a different story.
Lithium-ion batteries have been on offer to Australian homes and businesses for the last year or so
Whiltsher’s bill has more than halved. She enjoys the novelty of watching her “new toy” transforming the flow of energy around her house, leaving her largely independent of the wires outside.
At approaching $40,000, it hasn’t been a cheap investment. But that’s not the point.
“As far as I am concerned if it takes me off the grid then it’s paid for itself already,” she says.
Whiltsher’s enthusiasm to invest hard-earned cash for a home power system that may take as long as 12 years to pay for itself is being echoed around the country as Australians race to install batteries.
You may have read recent reports about huge changes in sea level, inspired by new research from James Hansen, NASA’s former Chief Climate Scientist, at Columbia University. Sea level rise represents one of the most worrying aspects of global warming, potentially displacing millions of people along coasts, low river valleys, deltas and islands.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s scientific climate body, forecasts rises of approximately 40 to 60 cm by 2100. But other studies have found much greater rises are likely.
Hansen and 16 co-authors found that with warming of 2C sea levels could rise by several metres. Hansen’s study was published in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussion, and has not as yet been peer-reviewed. It received much media coverage for its “alarmist” findings.
So how should we make sense of these dire forecasts?
Researchers have demonstrated that even if a geoengineering solution to CO2 emissions could be found, it wouldn’t be enough to save the oceans
“The chemical echo of this century’s CO2 pollutiuon will reverberate for thousands of years,” said the report’s co-author, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Image: T. Larkum)
German researchers have demonstrated once again that the best way to limit climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels now.
In a “thought experiment” they tried another option: the future dramatic removal of huge volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would, they concluded, return the atmosphere to the greenhouse gas concentrations that existed for most of human history – but it wouldn’t save the oceans.
That is, the oceans would stay warmer, and more acidic, for thousands of years, and the consequences for marine life could be catastrophic.
The research, published in Nature Climate Change today delivers yet another demonstration that there is so far no feasible “technofix” that would allow humans to go on mining and drilling for coal, oil and gas (known as the “business as usual” scenario), and then geoengineer a solution when climate change becomes calamitous.
The author doesn’t seem to get the difference between a hybrid and a plug-in hybrid, but otherwise it’s not a bad review
This car uses green technology, not just to reduce emissions, but to go faster
Until recently, hybrid cars were pretty sedate affairs. They were either for celebrities to be seen in, or they were the car your Uber driver arrived in. Now that’s changing, with the latest hybrids ranging from McLaren’s £866,000 P1 supercar to a string of saloons and hatchbacks from a range of mainstream car makers.
Enter Volkswagen and the new Golf GTE. Since the 1970s, the Golf has been the goose that laid the golden egg for VW, and the latest generation, the Mk VII, is an all-round brilliant machine. The GTE is its latest incarnation.
The idea is that if the all-electric VW Golf, which has a range of around 90 miles, leaves you worrying about broken charging stations and range anxiety, this new plug-in hybrid Golf GTE will tempt you. This, then, is a fast hybrid, a kind of Greenpeace-friendly hot hatch for polar bear-loving speed freaks.
The power comes from a combination of a 148bhp turbo-charged petrol engine and a 101bhp electric motor, which when combined can push out a maximum of 201bhp. The electric motor will charge in less than four hours from a domestic socket, or in just over two hours at a rapid-charging station of the type increasingly found at motorway service stations. This combination makes the GTE quicker to 60mph than the diesel-powered Golf GTD, while at the same time offering economy and emission figures to make a Toyota Prius blush, and leaving owners with a zero road-tax bill. If your daily commute is less than 31 miles (the electric-only range) this car offers incredibly low ownership costs and you could (theoretically) never fill up the tank.
However, this will depend on which of the five different drive modes you select, ranging from pure electric “E-mode” to “GTE”, which uses the petrol and electric powers to make this green Golf very quick indeed. If you indulge in this burst of power, though, electric range will drop to nearer 20 miles and the promised economy will be impossible to attain. Critics will say that it doesn’t live-up to the true heritage of the Golf GTI and doesn’t deserve the first two letters of its name. But this car uses green technology, not just to reduce emissions, but to go faster, to make driving fun. And that’s something to be celebrated.
