Hyundai and Kia plan to put solar panels on cars. VW won't rule out sharing electric cars with Ford. A prominent electric-car advocate takes issue with GM's plan for a national mandate. And a new report from the journal Nature shows global warming may already be much worse than expected. All this and more on Green Car Reports. As solar panels get... Solar from Hyundai, Kia; GM plan trouble, VW-Ford electrics, getting warmer: Today’s Car News
Hyundai and Kia plan to put solar panels on cars. VW won't rule out sharing electric cars with Ford. A prominent electric-car advocate takes issue with GM's plan for a national mandate. And a new report from the journal Nature shows global warming may already be much worse than expected. All this and more on Green Car Reports. As solar panels get...
A new study published Wednesday in the journal "Nature" shows global warming has already accelerated far beyond what scientists anticipated. The study uses new methods to measure global ocean temperatures, which showed the oceans have retained 60 percent more heat than earlier estimates showed. Scientists measured the volume of oxygen and carbon...
U.S. emissions of global-warming greenhouse gases fell 2.7 percent in 2017, despite the Trump administration's efforts to revive coal use in the U.S., the EPA announced on Monday. The EPA released data for 2017, showing an even larger 4.5 percent drop in emissions from power plants compared with 2016, as more coal plants are retired. So electric...
Two decades. That's all the time world leaders have to reverse emissions of greenhouse gases to avoid inundating coastal cities, killing off coral reefs and their attendant marine wildlife, and potential food shortages, according to a new UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report was the first commissioned by world...
A new report on pollution, economic growth, and renewable energy in California sheds new light on the link between emissions regulations and economic growth ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco next month. The report released Thursday shows that even as the state implemented stricter emissions standards than other states and...
Scientists at Harvard have developed a new method of scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere, and turning it into hydrocarbon fuels that could be burned in airplanes or even cars. The process has been demonstrated at a small scale and combines common technologies from the pulp and petroleum industries to capture carbon and hydrogenate it back into...
One of the main objections that critics of global warming mitigation measures often cite is that they cost too much. A new study in the journal Nature takes issue with that conclusion. Several studies since 1991 have concluded that it is cheaper to develop new technologies to mitigate climate change than it will be to adapt to it. What those...
With automotive emissions regulations again coming under political pressure, we thought we'd re run this Earth Day question from 2014 in an attempt to answer the question: Why all the fuss? Why do we still focus on green cars some 40 years after the EPA imposed the most significant emissions limits on cars? We hope it will provoke thought engender...
Despite the sturm und drang around the announcement by embattled EPA chief Scott Pruitt that he will relax emission limits for 2022 through 2025 vehicles, not much will happen immediately. His determination last week that the Obama administration was "incorrect" and that the limits on those vehicles weren't needed kicks off a lengthy process of...
While the name of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is often preceded by "embattled" these days, his agency is now on record as rejecting its own recommendation of just 16 months ago. It concluded in July 2016 that the auto industry had handily met lower carbon-emission limits from 2012 through 2017—at lower cost and with more conventional...
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt would be controversial even if he hadn't flown to Morocco in December (first-class, on the taxpayer dime) to lobby the country on the benefits of liquified natural gas while living in a condo owned by a lobbyist for the country's largest LNG exporter. He is likely the first EPA head to axe scientists from the...
The most recent detailed studies on the likely warming of Planet Earth are grim indeed, suggesting that we are collectively at "very high risk" for the most extreme effects of climate change. To stem that, mankind collectively will have to reduce its ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide radically and immediately. Now, one longtime advocate of...
It is now abundantly clear that the Trump administration in the U.S. is staffed with climate-science denialists and committed promoters for the greater extraction, sale, and combustion of fossil fuels. That includes coal, the dirtiest major fossil fuel of them all, with the highest emissions of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour when used to...
If a marketer talked enthusiastically about "healthy delicious cyanide," what would you think? You may wish to apply those judgments to mentions of "beautiful clean coal" by President Donald Trump, who used the phrase in Tuesday's State of the Union address. Trump claimed his administration had "ended the war" on "beautiful clean coal," while...
You may recall that President Donald Trump made some ambitious and audacious campaign promises about his plans to revive America's dwindling coal industry. Two weeks ago, The Washington Post fact-checked the president's delivery on those promises after his first year in office—in multiples of "Pinocchios," its measure of untruthfulness for...
Last month, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry signed an agreement with Saudi Arabian officials to research "carbon capture" technology for fossil fuels, the Department of Energy announced. Perry and Khalid Al Falih, the Saudi Minister of Energy, Industry, and Mineral Resources, signed a memorandum of understanding to "establish a framework for...