During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trump’s environmental policies. The Washington Post reports: Biden’s executive order recommitting the United States to the international struggle to slow global warming fulfilled a campaign promise and represented a stark repudiation of…
Tag: Fuel Efficiency
Why Passenger Jets Could Soon Be Flying In Formation
New submitter ragnar_ianal writes: Looking at the V-shaped formations of migrating ducks, scientists have long surmised that there are aeronautical efficiencies at play. Airbus is examining this in a practical manner to see if fuel efficiency can be enhanced. “Building on test flights in 2016 with an Airbus A380 megajet and A350-900 wide-body jetliner, [the Airbus fello’fly] hopes to demonstrate and…
Trump Administration, In Biggest Environmental Rollback, To Announce Auto Pollution Rules
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to announce its final rule to roll back Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, relaxing efforts to limit climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to combat climate change. The new rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department…
Airplane Contrails Will Do Triple the Damage They Do Today By 2050, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: The contrails left by airplanes last only hours. But they are now so widespread that their warming effect is greater than that of all the carbon dioxide emitted by airplanes that has accumulated in the atmosphere since the first flight of the Wright brothers. Worse still, this non-CO2 warming effect is set…
KLM Airlines To Fund Development of Fuel-Efficient Flying-V Plane
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced that it will help fund the development of a V-shaped, fuel-efficient airplane design known as the Flying-V. CNN reports: Intended to improve the sustainability of air travel, the Flying-V was conceived by Justus Benad, then a student at the Technical University of Berlin, and developed by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, also…
Ask Slashdot: Why Did It Take So Long For Cars To Become Aerodynamically Shaped?
Here’s what dryriver wondered after hearing that the oldest Porsche T64 in the world — built in 1939 — was going to be auctioned:
What stands out about this nearly 80 year old car is how curved and aerodynamically shaped it is. If you then Google 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s car images, you find that they are nowhere near as aerodynamic in…