Every trainee journalist is taught about a model of behaviour exhibited by the general public called ‘moral panics’. In a moral panic the media pumps out stories like it has bad guts after a curry and people get enraged over the issue. Currently there’s a swirl of stories going out on pollution killing us and
I got pretty excited when I heard that London was committing to buying only 100% emission-free buses for all single-decker city center routes. Likewise, when Eindhoven and Helmond bought 43 extra-long electric buses, it felt like one more step toward cleaner, greener cities. Given that Paris, Athens, Mexico City and Madrid are pledging to ban
My brother-in-law sent me a video this morning of a talk given by Tony Seba at the Swedbank Nordic Energy Summit in March of last year. I started watching it with mild interest, as it covered many of the topics I’ve already been harping on in recent posts: • Solar power will keep getting cheaper
Electric cars will be good for the planet and autonomous vehicles will reduce the number of road accidents. That much we know. But what other impacts will the coming automobile revolution provide? First, a bit of managing expectations: without regulatory incentives, America’s electric car adoption looks like it will be slow to grow, and the
Is this the nightmare future for owners of today’s diesel cars? It’s 2020 and you are already taxed out of driving into the city centre. At the pumps the price of diesel has soared. The low-emission zone has extended to your suburb. Do you carry on paying extra, or sell for a small fraction of
The industrial age of energy and transportation will be over by 2030. Maybe before. Exponentially improving technologies such as solar, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy and transportation industries as we know it. The same Silicon Valley ecosystem that created bit-based technologies that have disrupted atom-based industries is
Electric Car Sales Boom As UK Vehicle Sales Hit a 12-Year High The popularity of the electric car has increased exponentially in recent years, with projections of 2 million electric cars shortly on the world’s roads (Guardian, 2016). This in turn has seen many adaptations such as charging points at service stations and even fast-food
Carmakers face short-term pain and long term gain THE high-pitched whirr of an electric car may not stir the soul like the bellow and growl of an internal combustion engine (ICE). But to compensate, electric motors give even the humblest cars explosive acceleration. Electric cars are similarly set for rapid forward thrust. Improving technology and
In December 2016, Google announced that they are set to reach 100% renewable energy to power everything such as their offices and server farms. Every year people search Google trillions of times and upload over 400 hours of YouTube every minute! All of that takes a very large amount of processing power which means a
WHAT WE LEARNED IN 2016: After many false dawns, 2016 was the year electric cars showed they are on a path to rapidly replacing the infernal combustion engine. There are now more than half a million battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on Europe’s roads, and annual sales are expected to top 1.5% of the
