Climate Cities
All Stories
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Can text messaging solve some of our cities’ climate & traffic challenges?
A story in the new Plenty magazine gives details on a cab company that's giving the late-night clubbing crowd of Liverpool great green service with the magic of text messages:
It's a solution any 14-year-old would love: The challenges of foreign oil dependency, global warming, and gridlock are not so big that you can't text-message your way out of them.
The Texxi text-dispatchers arrange carpool cab rides based on who's texting from where and their desired destinations. Besides the other benefits, it also saves its riders money, which is proving popular. The company is planning to leap the pond and expand to cities in Texas, California, and North Carolina -- but of course, you need to have a mobile phone that can text message, leaving this here Luddite out.
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Just what India needs!
Really cheap cars. And so, hope continues to recede into the distance. Vroom vroom!
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Hastings Makes Less Waste?
Central Nebraska town wins greenest city in America contest We say “greenest city in America,” and you say — Portland? Seattle? Savannah? Try Hastings, Nebraska. The town of 25,000 beat […]
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Barrier Methods
Galveston, Texas, expected to approve history-defying development plans The city of Galveston perches precariously on a Texas barrier island; some 8,000 people were killed there by a hurricane in 1900. […]
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Conservatives wage war against smart growth
Who doesn’t love placemaking? Well, a growing band of conservatives who are getting all bent out of shape about the smart-growth movement. They’re getting so worked up about it that […]
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Public transit
For over two weeks I’ve been meaning to link to this post on public transit from Michael O’Hare and say something interesting about it. So as not to delay it […]
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California takes the lead
California is once again taking the lead: California Attorney General Jerry Brown has sued San Bernardino County, the largest in area in the contiguous USA and one of the fastest […]
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A new idea for how to transport the stuff in cars
I have never been a fan of hydrogen technology as a solution to the climate change problem. It would be great if we could power automobiles with hydrogen (generated, of course, with renewable energy), but how do you carry the hydrogen around in your car? Do you really want to be driving around on top of a tank full of compressed hydrogen? Can you say Hindenburg?
I just listened to a great segment on this week's Science Friday. The guest, Jerry Woodall, a professor at Purdue, has an interesting idea for how to carry hydrogen in a way that seems extremely safe to me.
The idea is that you carry around a bunch of aluminum. You react the aluminum with water, and that produces hydrogen, which would then be immediately burned. In the end, you're left with a tank full of aluminum oxide, which will be recycled back into aluminum (using, of course, renewable energy) at a recycling facility.
This seems like a great idea, one that makes me reconsider my skepticism towards hydrogen. But listen to the segment yourself. Also, check out the presentations on this site.
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Hy-Wire hydrogen car
BBC takes a closer look at the Hy-Wire, GM’s hydrogen fuel cell car. According to the incredulous host, it’s “the future.”
