big, black Secret Service S.U.V. pulled up, one of the type favored by entertainment moguls and Manhattan limousine services, which weigh more than five thousand pounds and get about seven or eight miles to the gallon, on a good day.
Behind the huge gas guzzler, there was a little black Fiat 500L, the same car had ferried Pope Francis into town from Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday afternoon. Apart from the fact that it bore the license plate SCV 1, denoting it as the first vehicle of the Vatican City (“Status Civitatis Vaticanae”), it looked like any other 500L—a 1.4-liter, somewhat elongated version of the iconic Fiat 500, which gets about thirty-five miles to the gallon and costs around twenty thousand dollars. A Marine sentry held open the rear door on the passenger side, and the seventy-eight-year-old Pope climbed out to greet the President. He’d been in the United States, which accounts for about a fifth of the world’s total oil consumption, for only about eighteen hours, and up to that point hadn’t said a word in public. Already, however, he had delivered a message.
That’s how this Pope often operates—through symbolism and gestures that convey his intentions in ways that words never could.
.. Back in July, 2013, Francis instructed Catholic priests to drive modest vehicles. ”It hurts me when I see a priest or nun with the latest-model car,” he said. ”You can’t do this. A car is necessary to do a lot of work, but, please, choose a more humble one. If you like the fancy one, just think about how many children are dying of hunger in the world.” The same month, he was spotted arriving at a papal summer house in a five-year-old Ford Focus.
Why Elon Musk Now Wants to Build Hundreds of Tesla ‘Gigafactories’
He originally said the gigafactory could eventually push the cost of lithium-ion cells down by 30 percent, but has since amped up that prediction.
“I think we can probably do better than 30 percent,” Musk said, according to Bloomberg. “[With automakers increasing demand] there’s going to need to be lots of gigafactories. Just to supply auto demand you need 200 gigafactories.”
.. Musk told CBS’ 60 Minutes earlier this year that he’s not only unafraid of failure, but that he actually expected his company to fail.
Inside the Power Plant Fueling America’s Drought
The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water — lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles — has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand.
.. In a series of reports, ProPublica has examined how the West’s water crisis is as much a product of human error and hubris as it is of nature.
.. But in pushing for dramatic changes at the Navajo plant, the EPA underestimated how intertwined the plant had become with every aspect of life in the region — from providing its power to moving its water to buttressing the tribal economy
.. The West is full of people like him. Indeed, as the region gets more crowded, drier and hotter, there is talk not of living within the current constraints but of engineering new ways to gather additional supplies of water. The West must continue to grow, Kyl says, or it will begin slipping backward. He thinks it will be necessary to shoot silver iodide into the clouds in an effort to make it rain or to build plants to desalt ocean water.
.. Wockner and others say the elaborate projects built along the river amount to expensive distractions. The more permanent solution: Put the Colorado’s limited water to the best purpose, by planting more efficient crops, irrigating with modern equipment, writing laws that incentivize conservation, and reducing energy spent moving water over large distances.
In Bolivia, Untapped Bounty Meets Nationalism
“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.