Modern farming depends heavily on nitrogen fertilizer because crops need nitrogen to build proteins, chlorophyll and ultimately yield, yet most major crops cannot directly use the nitrogen gas that makes up most of the atmosphere. Farmers have to buy nitrogen in forms plants can use, generally through ammonia, urea and … [continued]
"NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP Satellite Captures Night-time Look at Cyclone Felleng" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
For years, I have been writing that the insurance industry will strongly influence the climate change debate, because its mission it to identify risks and price its policies accordingly. You can’t build a new 80 story tower stuffed with luxury condominiums on the edge of an ocean if you can’t … [continued]
Bus electrification turns governance choices into long-lived infrastructure choices: routes and operators can change more easily than depots, chargers and grid capacity.
Britain’s bus reforms are usually discussed as a privatization story. Outside London, the 1980s reforms deregulated local bus markets and gave commercial operators far more freedom over routes and timetables. London kept public control of the passenger network while private companies competed to operate specified services. Edinburgh, Dublin and more … [continued]
Way back in the day, in another professional life, I was the director of a nonprofit focused on promoting bicycling, mass transit, and sustainable development — but especially bicycling. One thing we highlighted was how little people actually drive on a daily basis. The average American drives 31 to 37 … [continued]
Europe is building a hydrogen-refuelling network before there is a large hydrogen-truck market to support it. Under the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation, hydrogen stations are supposed to be available along major motorway corridors at intervals of no more than 200 kilometres by 2030, with additional coverage at designated urban nodes. … [continued]
Glasgow and London both use private bus operators; the important difference is who designs the passenger network they collectively deliver.
Walk around Glasgow as I did this summer and the bus companies are hard to miss. First Glasgow, McGill’s, Stagecoach and other operators have their own brands and vehicles, which can make the city look as though its public transport system has been divided among private companies. Being a bit … [continued]
Across hundreds of procurement records and very different transit markets, battery-electric has become the reference technology for zero-emission bus fleets.
Zero-emission bus procurement has moved beyond the stage where battery-electric and hydrogen fuel-cell buses should be treated as two parallel technologies waiting for the market to decide between them. Transit agencies have now spent years operating both, rebuilding depots, installing charging and refuelling infrastructure, training technicians and discovering which assumptions … [continued]
Every Tesla Model 3 and Model Y built in the US on or after October 1, 2026, is capable of vehicle to home (V2H) operation, according to Not A Tesla App. In fact, some cars built as long ago as April may have the upgrade available, as some cars were … [continued]
Healthy social housing has to provide winter warmth, summer safety and clean indoor air, while retrofit sequencing determines how quickly residents receive those benefits.
“Fabric first” starts from a sensible building-efficiency idea. Improve insulation, stop unnecessary draughts, fix ventilation and reduce heat demand before replacing a gas or oil boiler with a heat pump. Some homes plainly need that work, and cheap measures such as loft insulation, draught repair and basic remediation can be … [continued]
Graphyte can deliver durable carbon removal, but burial should compete with the other useful services the same biomass could provide first.
Graphyte’s Carbon Casting process is unusually tangible for engineered carbon removal. Residual biomass is dried, compressed into dense blocks, protected from water and microbes, and stored underground so its carbon stays out of the atmosphere for a very long time. Compared with direct air capture and some other carbon-removal proposals, … [continued]
