It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change — as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear. This is a global thing, and it’s really hard for people to get their minds around the amount of reduction required. Every year we’re increasing the amount of CO2 we put out, and yet we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction. To make that happen, the rich world is going to have to be way down — way down — in energy use.
Naomi Klein: Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?
it’s pretty much taken as a given in climate policy circles that if there’s to be any hope at all of hewing to 2 degrees, the EU and the US will have to cut their emissions drastically—by 80 percent or more over the coming
.. Klein contends not just that emission trends can be turned around in time, but that pretty much everything else that’s wrong with society today—inequality, unemployment, the lack of access in large parts of the world to electricity or clean water or health care—can be righted in the process. Climate change, she writes, “if treated as a true planetary emergency,” could “become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.”
.. All you really need to know to understand the plan is that, if you’re American, you currently live in a 12,000-watt society; if you’re Dutch, you live in an 8,000-watt society; if you’re Swiss, you live in a 5,000-watt society; and if you’re Bangladeshi you live in a 300-watt society.
The Hypercar Lives: Meet VW’s XL1
The XL1 came in at a staggering 313 miles per Imperial gallon of diesel. That’s the efficiency equivalent of more than 230 miles per U.S. gallon of gasoline.
In 1993, after two years’ validation with the industry, RMI put the Hypercar concept into the public domain so nobody could patent it and to encourage competition leveraging its ideas, while RMI’s for-profit spinoffs sought to commercialize technologies outside automakers’ comfort zone and raise the competitive pressure.
.. Two decades ago he claimed regenerative braking could yield 70 percent efficiency when automakers balked at the idea of exceeding 30. Today’s electric vehicles, including the Chevy Volt and Tesla Model S, respectively get 70+ and 80 percent.
.. Despite XL1’s eye-popping mpg rating, VW might have left some efficiency on the table. Lovins notes that Toyota’s 2007 1/X concept car, also a plug-in hybrid, had four seats and the interior volume of a Prius, but weighed only 926 pounds, so even a production-ready version would probably weigh less than the two-seat XL1. “We’re seeing a lot of partially executed solutions,” says Jerry Weiland, the GM veteran who leads RMI’s transportation practice. “Different automakers have done bits and pieces [of the Hypercar concept], but no one has put the whole thing together.”
Epicor: Carbon Accounting Software
Epicor carbon accounting software is intended to help companies identify, analyze, audit, track, manage, benchmark, and report on their carbon emissions/environmental impact and energy consumption.