Volvo To Go All Electric By 2030

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Volvo’s entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of automakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade. “I am totally convinced there will be no customers who really want to stay with a petrol engine,” Volvo…

Cities Are Starting To Ban New Gas Stations

Petaluma, California, has voted to outlaw new gas stations, the first of what climate activists hope will be numerous cities and counties to do so. From a report: The movement aims to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles. “This is not a ban on the existing gas stations, which are providing all the gas currently needed,” Matt Krogh, U.S. oil and…

Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin’s total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the…

Motor industry lobbied for a loophole in UK fossil fuel car ban

The UK government plan announced in 2020 is to ban new petrol and diesel model cars by 2030, but some fossil-fuelled cars are to be exempt. Now it has emerged that the concession came after lobbying by the UK car-makers’ trade body Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2269011-motor-industry-lobbied-for-a-loophole-in-uk-fossil-fuel-car-ban/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Can air pollution help us find alien life?

To find alien life in our universe, scientists have considered searches for optical lasers or even giant energy-harvesting structures known as Dyson spheres. Now they’re suggesting a more mundane sort of search, a hunt for air pollution in exoplanet atmospheres. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/can-pollution-help-us-find-alien-life…

Are Texas Blackouts a Warning About the Follow-on Effects of Climate Change?

This week in America, “continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states,” reports the New York Times. But that was just the beginning… One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were disrupted. The crisis carries a…

Ford Plans for All Cars Sold in Europe To Be Electric by 2030

Ford has pledged that all of its cars on sale in Europe will be electric by 2030, in the latest move by the world’s biggest auto manufacturers to set out plans to move away from polluting internal combustion engines before looming bans on fossil-fuel vehicles across the world. From a report: The US car giant said on Wednesday that it was…