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Comedian Denis Leary's always been controversial, but now he's sticking his finger in Hollywood's eco-friendly eye, claiming he needs trucks and his goal is to leave Earth with the biggest carbon footprint he possibly can. More »
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What's the best thing about garbage trucks? They're loud. At least that's what you think when you're seven. But once you grow into your big-boy pants, that monstrosity slowly lumbering down your street, waking you up at 5AM every Tuesday, gets to be just a tad annoying after a while. Well, now Volvo has a solution, a hybrid garbage truck. They claim it can operate almost silently, and feel so confident about it they've provided a video of it in action. Currently the trucks are just being tested in select parts of Sweden, but we certainly wouldn't mind seeing these, and not hearing them, in our neighborhood. Press release after the jump. More »
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Here's another creative ad from Renault that's just as the funny Renault Megane GT commercial, though with less big-bottomed girls on bikes. It involves talking leaves, dancing stars and one bewildered Production Assistant named Willy. Is this what a car commercial directed by Luis Bunuel would look like? Even better, we have a translation from M0L0TOV below the jump for those who do not speak Spanish. More »
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We've all heard Jeremy Clarkson's foaming-at-mouth diatribes against everything that smacks of vehicular enviro-verdo-communism, and we get the sense that his coworker James May probably falls somewhere to the right of that stance, though he expresses it in a somewhat less bombastic manner. Yes indeed, we figured Mr. May recoiled from thoughts of a future packed with tiny-carbon-footprint vehicles the way Queen Victoria would have recoiled from gay amputee dental fetish porn. But we were wrong! He likes the idea! Read his latest column to see why. [Telegraph.co.uk] More »
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Let's get this straight. Exercising like a meth-addicted Richard Simmons and then stuffing your face like Cookie Jarvis is none too good for the global atmosphere. "Eating less and driving to save energy would be better," environmentalist Chris Goodall told the Times. His reasoning — sure to please couch potatoes everywhere — is based on calculating the environmental cost of food versus oil production. Surprisingly, it's the food that pollutes more. According to Goodall, Author of "How to Live a Low Carbon Life" and a Green Party parliamentary candidate in England, driving a typical UK car for three miles adds around 0.9 kg of CO2 to the atmosphere, while walking the same distance uses about 180 calories, which you'd need 100 grams of beef to replace. And that would result in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving. Damn forensic mathematics and the insufferable law of unintended consequences. [via Times Online] More »
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The idea of a little box that can capture most of the carbon dioxide in a car's exhaust and hold it in an easily-extracted inert state sounds plenty appealing, and the Greenbox claims to do just that. Sure, there's a hint of cold-fusion-style nutcasery about it (coal-burning power plants have a helluva time grabbing CO2 out of exhaust with entire buildings full of equipment, not to mention the fact that algae-produced diesel is still a distant dream), but if it works we'll all be driving 1500-foot-pound diesels running on algae juice into a happy future! [Reuters, via Engadget] More »
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Swedes have long been accustomed to packing their berserker physiques and cases of aquavit into bulky, gas-swilling Volvo wagons and equally thirsty hot-rod Saabs when they hit the Scandinavian road, but that may have to change, according to this article in the Gray Lady. The rest of Yurp is getting all squinchy-faced over Sweden's love of carbon-crazed cars, laying some heavy guilt-trippage on the Swedes, and it may be only a matter of time before Sven och Agnetha are crammed into a new Mitsubishi Minicamino. Hmm... a retro-style Minicamino could be the answer to global warming! More »
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Since London and New York City are so damn interconnected, it was only a matter of time before London's idea of charging drivers to enter the city's core would spread to NYC's overlords. Now that time has come; Mayor Bloomberg has proclaimed that it's time to "... face up to the fact that our population growth is putting our city on a collision course with the environment, which itself is growing more unstable and uncertain." The proposal is for drivers of vehicles venturing into Manhattan below 86th Street to cough up some bread for the privilege: $21 per day for trucks, $8 for cars. Environmentalists like the idea, truckers and borough dwellers may not; look for a hard-fought battle over this one. We're just wondering if there's a Zamboni loophole. – Murilee Martin More »
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Guess we'd better make other plans for this week, lest we run afoul of one pro-bicycle group that aims to shut down the Chicago auto show. The group, AutoShowShutdown.org recently launched a web parody of the Chicago show's site, on which they provided counterpoint to the show site's content. The group even rebuffed a cease-and-desist letter from the show's organizers, with the support of online free-speech advocates the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Their plan is to protest the show's "egregious display of automobile glorification" this coming Saturday, the first of the show's public days at Chicago's McCormick Place. Kind of reminds us of ourselves when we were wee lads protesting arrogant roadway bikers. Of course the only slogan we could come up with at the time was "We won't pedal, death to false metal!" Right, we didn't quit our day jobs. – Mike Spinelli More »
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Now we've all seen the tide turn, smashing the SUV against the rocks like a third-world fishing boat. If you drive one in Europe, you may as well have set off a dirty bomb in a schoolyard - such is the naked aggression towards the forest-burning, baby-seal-clubbing chariots of death. More »
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