EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
If you’re the lead foot in your family — or if you’re just annoyed by the lead-footed driver in your family — you’ll enjoy this video about saving gas. It’s cute, and makes a good point.
This little ditty won the video contest sponsored by the Drive Smarter Challenge, a campaign by the Alliance to Save Energy, with support from many other energy-focused groups. It’s timely, as we prepare to hit the roads for the holidays.
The Cash for Clunkers program, which ended this week, may have been more environmentally friendly than originally thought. The concern among environmentalists was that by tossing away old cars and buying news ones, the program encouraged a throw-away society mentality — something Americans are often accused of.
The Sierra Club, says spokesman Jesse Prentice-Dunn, initially had concerns that the bill was weak.
“Now, looking at the final stats,” he says, “consumers did buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. One thing that was very encouraging, was that more than 84 percent traded in trucks and other gas guzzlers; and 59 percent purchased cars.”
They may not have purchased hybrids, says Prentice-Dunn — the Prius was No. 7 on the list of cars purchased. However, the fact that they bought more fuel-efficient cars was important. The Sierra Club, he says, was encouraged by consumers’ choices.
Desperate automobile dealers are slashing sticker prices, passing on rebates and offering zero percent financing to move metal, making this a good time to buy a new car. And the good times are about to get better thanks to the federal “Cash for Clunkers” program kicking off later this month.
The Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) signed into law last month is designed to help car makers and the environment by providing vouchers of $3,500 to $4,500 toward the purchase of a new vehicle in exchange for a gas-guzzling clunker. The program essentially inflates the trade-in value of older cars and trucks, providing drivers an incentive to go ahead and buy a new, more fuel-efficient rig right now.
How do cars pollute? In two main ways, through inefficient mileage (guzzling a gallon of gas every eight or 10 or 14 miles) and through tailpipe emissions.
There’s the pollution associated with manufacturing, also, but to keep it simple let’s stick with emissions and mileage. Obviously, both affect the air. Think of mileage as a measure of your car’s pollution volume over time – if a gallon of gas doesn’t take you very far, you have to burn a lot more gas — and emissions as the chemistry of that pollution; if the mix is particularly noxious, your car will be a bigger offender than one with better tailpipe controls.
So if you want to buy the cleanest car you can — in the price range you need — you’ll look at both factors. Fortunately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already done this work, assigning a “greenhouse gas” score to most models. Find it at the EPA’s Green Vehicles website.
When Rachel Ray chooses a saute pan, cooks take note.
So American car shoppers, here’s the equivalent: Sokolis Group, a fuel management and consulting company, has selected the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid to be its company car.
Last summer, we reported on an effort by professors at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business to get the world to change the way it thinks about automotive fuel efficiency: Ranking cars in terms of miles per gallon, they explained, is much less helpful when it comes to making green choices than ranking the gallons required to drive a set number of miles.
While automakers and garage-based inventors work on replacing the car as we know it, a scientist at Temple University claims to have found a way of squeezing more out of the ones we already own with a process tongue-twistingly dubbed electrorheology.
A team led by professor Rongjia Tao implemented the principle for a small device that creates a strong electric field to make auto fuel less viscous; that allows much smaller fuel droplets to be injected into the engine for combustion. As the authors explain in the introduction to their paper: “Because combustion starts at the interface between fuel and air and most harmful emissions are coming from incomplete burning, reducing the size of fuel droplets would increase the total surface area to start burning, leading to a cleaner and more efficient engine.”
Saturday marked the end of a tour hoping to convince Americans that hydrogen-fueled cars are not as far away from practicality as we might think.
The Hydrogen Road Tour ‘08 was an explicit (if partial) answer to the lament “what does it matter if I can buy a hydrogen car, if I can’t get fuel for it?”: Starting in Portland, Maine and ending in Los Angeles, the varied cars in this caravan covered the continent while running entirely on hydrogen.
