Is the affordable electric car (EV) finally here? The Renault Zoe will be in showrooms by spring 2012, just in time to be driven (congestion charge free, of course) through the streets of London to the Olympic Games. It should cost around £12,000, although with an additional, unexpected, expense. You lease the battery for around… Continue reading
Browsing Category Environment
Could solar meet world's energy needs by 2027?
Here’s a man who is outrageously optimistic about solar power. You may think he’s being hopelessly positive, naive even, but read this. Most of futurist Ray Kurzweil’s apparently accurate predictions come from his law of accelerating returns. According to him there’s an exponential progress in information technology. Advances feed on themselves, to help create the… Continue reading →
BBC film literary series in restaurant serving endangered blue fin tuna
Part of the flagship BBC2 series Faulks on Fiction has been shot in a London restaurant which sells one of the most endangered fish species in the oceans. In the third part of the series presenter Sebastian Faulks is filmed dining in Nobu, whose owner is accused by conservationists of helping to drive the bluefin… Continue reading →
Have low-energy, eco-friendly homes finally become affordable?
(The author has written extensively for the Sunday Times Home section.) I blogged last month about the “tea cosy houses” that should cost hardly anything to heat. This is an estate of 14 housing association homes now being built at Wimbish in Essex. Click here to read more. It will be one of the first… Continue reading →
Life on the margin just got better for birds
Walking on a footpath near my home last weekend, I came across something I haven’t seen in that field before. A low cost avian “lifebelt”. All the farmer had done was not plough a 10 metre strip down the side of the field, reducing his yield by a few percent. But the benefit to nature… Continue reading →
Big boost for radically new wind turbine
The more we accept the need for renewable energy, the more we seem to have it in for wind turbines. They creak and groan and, many say, blight fine landscape. They kill birds, it is alleged. They are just too big and intimidating for the virtuous life. Yet we know we would be mad not… Continue reading →