Who can forget when Bill Ford explained during the great restructuring last year that his company had traditionally sold low quality cars to Americans but high quality to Europeans. He said they thought there was no market for quality cars in America until after the crisis they noticed foreign brands outselling theirs.
The European Focus will be their first step to change this, introducing a quality compact car as detailed by Wired in their “Big Bet on Small Cars” article. Naturally, I expect they will not introduce the diesel Focus in America. Why do they bet on small cars instead of efficient cars?
Mercedes has been working on the holy grail of cool engine efficiency technology: aerodynamic diesel-hybrids built out of Advanced High-Strength Steels (AHSS). The new E300 mercedes gets 52mpg (4.5 l/100km). Once again, only available outside America.
There seems to be a leadership gap in the US as conservative market followers dominate the auto industry…so sad that the executive that brought the Prius to America died. He might have been in a position to really speed up innovation and competition. It was a leading design when it was introduced, primarily as it proved there was pent-up market demand, but the Prius is too weak and compact to make sense in the American market of road-trips and hauling cargo.
Ford should take the 500/Taurus and make a high-performance diesel option to compete with the Audi and Mercedes variants. It also should bring the EuroFocus diesel and go hybrid with it by 2012.
Air travel creates a huge amount of carbon dioxide, so San Francisco has installed an offset system for travelers in kiosks at SFO
Climate Passport contributions fund the Garcia River Forest, a reforestation project in Mendocino County where redwood and Douglas fir trees are being added to a forest that had been heavily logged. They also go to the SFCarbon Fund, which is steering the money to Dogpatch Biofuels, a bio-diesel fueling station in southeastern San Francisco.
I would much prefer to buy them through the ticketing process so the offsets could be distributed, although there are certainly advantages to supporting local offsets.
The Urban Eco Map of San Francisco reports that my neighborhood is leading the city in pounds composed and is third overall! A wide margin separates the top two zip codes in composting. Is there an award?
As far as cities go, San Francisco is one of the cleanest and greenest in the US. We have great mass transit. Much of our energy comes from clean, renewable sources. We recycle 72% of our trash. And we are well on our way to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels – ahead of the Kyoto Protocol.
Balboa is in solid last place with huge amounts of CO2, energy used and very little recycling. There is no deeper analysis of the data on the site, just numbers. It would be nice if the Take Action page could be correlated to a neighborhood. Just by selecting all the waste action items I was able to get to 100% on the contribution chart, leaving energy and transportation untouched. That doesn’t seem right and inconsistent with the charts.
The Helius Group has announced a joint venture with The Combination of Rothes Distillers (CoRD) called Helius CoRDe. Their goal is to create a renewable (biomass-powered) combined heat and power (CHP) plant for whisky production on Speyside (northeastern Scotland).
The proposed £50 million project will use whisky distillery by-products to fuel a 7.2 MWe GreenSwitch biomass combined heat and power plant and a GreenFields plant which will turn the liquid co-product of whisky production, known as Pot Ale, into a concentrated organic fertiliser and an animal feed for use by local farmers.
This is the first biomass plant to use dark grains (draff) instead of wood as its fuel. The 7.2 MWe is equivalent to power for about 9,000 homes, yet the new CHP is expected to produce only 5,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year. A coal-fired plant of the same size would generate more than three times that amount. Perhaps the best thing about this news is that it makes whiskey, usually treated as a conservative and venerable industry, innovative and reconnects it to the conservation and sustainability of nature.
Here is a list of single malts in Speyside that could benefit from the new plant.
* Aberlour Single Malt
* Ardmore Single Malt
* Aultmore Single Malt
* Balmenach Single Malt
* Balvenie
* Benriach Single Malt
* Benromach Single Malt
* Cardhu Single Malt
* Cragganmore
* Dailuaine
* Dufftown Single Malt
* Glendronach Single Malt
* Glendullan Single Malt
* Glenfarclas Single Malt
* Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch Whisky
* Glen Grant
* Glen Keith Single Malt
* The Glenlivet
* The Glenrothes
* Glentauchers Single Malt
* Glen Elgin
* Glen Moray
* Imperial Single Malt
* Inchgower Single Malt
* Knockando
* Linkwood Single Malt
* Lismore Single Malt
* Longmorn Single Malt
* The Macallan
* McClelland’s Speyside
* Miltonduff Single Malt
* Mortlach Single Malt
* Speyburn Single Malt
* The Speyside
* Strathisla Single Malt
* Tamnavulin Glenlivet Single Malt
* Tamdhu
* Tomintoul Single Malt
* Tormore Single Malt