November 2nd, 2011

If Americans substituted biking for just half of their daily short car trips they’d enjoy extensive health benefits, while contributing to cleaner air, which would enhance health in their entire community, according to a study by University of Wisconsin researchers released today.

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September 1st, 2010

Not everyone can afford to pay the freight for one of those new electric cars hitting the market this year. Others may be leery of the long-term viability of hybrids. What to do if you’re driving a conventional gasoline-powered car and still want to help the environment? Maintaining your vehicle’s fuel system can improve performance, lower emissions and save you money, too.

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May 19th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports

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.

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April 30th, 2009

By Clint Williams
Green Right Now

Do I believe in love at first sight? Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time. Like when driving the 2010 Mazda3 to the grocery store.

We had just made a left out of our subdivision, accelerated sharply, hit a big sweeping country-road sort of curve and coming out the other end – less than two miles into a week-long test drive – I said aloud: “I like this car.”

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April 22nd, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

The first full day of hearings on that proposed law known as Waxman-Markey, which would promote clean energy, foster green jobs and set up a system to curb greenhouse gas emissions, began today, fittingly, on Earth Day.

But how do we make sense of this sweeping piece of legislation that affects everything from the air you breathe to the refrigerator you use? You could watch the hearings on C-Span over the next few weeks. (If you are unemployed, have all day long to plop in front of the tube and can remain alert for extended periods while people discuss abstractions like “carbon allowances” and “international offsets” this might be for you!)

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October 7th, 2008

By Shermakaye Bass

Those who’ve tried The Blade say it works – though, so far, we’ve not met any of them. The proported fuel-conserving, emissions cleansing attachment for autos hit the market late last year amid kudos and celebrity endorsements (Sheryl Crow, Laura Dern and Ben Harper say it’s da bomb).

The simple tail-pipe attachment/filter is said to cut auto emissions by 57 percent, and greenhouse gases by six to 34 percent, depending on the model of your car. That makes the $200 price tag reasonable enough for the carbon-conscious.

But the fact that it can increase fuel economy up to five miles per gallon makes it attractive to just about every Joe and Jane Sixpack in the country.

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September 22nd, 2008

By Catherine Colbert

When David Kilbourne picked up his 8-year-old son from Lake Travis Elementary in spring 2007, he noticed smoke billowing from idling buses parked in queue behind the school. The exhaust fumes his son was breathing each day as he waited to be picked up, he says, were contributing to his son’s migraine headaches. “My son is the quarterback for his youth football team,” said Kilbourne. “Because there’s only one quarterback, when he gets these headaches, it affects the team.”

Kilbourne remembers noticing the bus exhaust during the school’s bus safety week. “They were talking about how buses are safe when it comes to traffic accidents,” he said, “but there’s more to a bus’s safety than traffic accidents, like having air that’s safe to breathe.”

The coincidence spurred Kilbourne to take action. Not only did he write several letters to his local newspaper, but Kilbourne approached the head of his district’s transportation department to discuss air quality in and around its buses. After he spoke to Rick Walterscheid, the transportation director at the Lake Travis Independent School District, the school system put a no-idling policy into effect.

Walterscheid didn’t stop there, either. Later that year the 79th Texas Legislature adopted House Bill 3469, which established and authorized the formation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to administer a statewide clean school bus program.

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August 28th, 2008

By Harriet Blake

Residents of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area will again get a chance to trade in their pollution-emitting old clunker for a newer, less polluting car with the help of state money.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) reports that it has about $12 million for the second year of the AirCheckTexas Drive a Clean Machine campaign, which began taking applications in mid-August.

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January 17th, 2008

By John DeFore A study released today by researchers at UCLA holds more bad news for those concerned with the effects of auto emissions: Nanoparticles (those on the scale of a virus or molecule), which are so small they can’t be filtered by existing technology, may not simply harm our lungs — they may actually [...]

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