Robert Vinet

Traveller

Category: Environment (Page 1 of 7)

The scale of the devastation in the storm-ravaged Bahamas following Hurricane Dorian is simply massive » 76,000 people in need of immediate life-saving assistance » Updated Sept 12

2019.09.12 /

Sept 12

» Officially 50 people are dead.

» 2,500 are listed as missing, and presumed to be dead.

» Some 76,000 people have lost almost everything.

» Damage estimated at US$7 Billion.

» US gov’t denies temporary protected status to Bahamian victims of Hurricane Dorian

 

Sept 9

» At least 45 people are dead » Hundreds more are missing » Some 70,000 are homeless.

» There is no power or running water.

» Aid is arriving slowly.

» Damage one usually witnesses in a war zone.

» More at CNN…

 

Sept 7

NBC reports »

» 43 people confirmed dead in Bahamas as Hurricane Dorian toll expected to rise ‘significantly’

»

CBC reports »

» “Charities, government agencies and even cruise ships loaded with supplies and volunteers rushed emergency aid …”

» …hundreds and perhaps thousands remained missing in the archipelago nation of about 400,000 people”

» “The United Nations estimated 70,000 people were in “immediate need of life-saving assistance” such as food, water and shelter.”

More at The Guardian,

Sept 5

» Accessing damage in the Bahamas » Photos » NY Mag

» At least 20 30 lives have been lost » Some estimates are in the thousands of lives lost.

» The Red Cross is reporting that as many as 13,000 homes have been severely damaged or destroyed across the Bahamas » BBC…

Norwegians are EV obsessed and the Tesla Model 3 accounted for 12.4% of all vehicle sales in Norway from January–July 2019

2019.09.08 /

California’s a huge market for Tesla, the Netherlands loves Tesla, Switzerland loves Tesla, but no state or country is as Tesla obsessed as Norway.

Whereas electric vehicles are still at 1–2% market share in many auto markets, or 6–10% in good markets, fully electric vehicles accounted for 38% of new passenger vehicle sales in Norway last month.

If you’re like me, you’d like to check your senses now and confirm the 38% related to fully electric vehicles, not also plug-in hybrids. Indeed, that’s only for the purest of the pure, while another 25% were hybrids, 41% of which were plug-in hybrids. That means nearly 50% of new vehicle sales were plug-in vehicles sales.

King of the hill among all of these electric and electrified vehicles, as usual, was the Tesla Model 3. The Model 3 is so popular there that it accounted for 12.4% of the Norwegian auto market in January–July of this year. Good luck finding a country with a 12.4% EV market share, let alone a 12.4% Tesla Model 3 market share. That percentage means that one out of every eight vehicles sold in the country was a Model 3 — not for one month, not for two months, but for a 7 month timespan.

» Read more about electric vehicle sales in Norway by Zachary Shahan in Clean Technica

The air conditioner is heating up the world

2019.09.06 /

There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – about one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year – about the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today.

All of these reports note the awful irony of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.

The global dominance of air conditioning was not inevitable. As recently as 1990, there were only about 400m air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the US. Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning eventually came to be seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning went global. Today, as with other drivers of the climate crisis, we race to find solutions – and puzzle over how we ended up so closely tied to a technology that turns out to be drowning us.

Read more by Stephen Buranyi at The Guardian…

Watch » The Icebreaker in the Arctic Ocean

2019.07.01 /

This video was shot in the Arctic Ocean in March 2018.

For 7 days the crew passed through the Barents Sea to Karsky around the Novaya Zemlya archipelago on the nuclear icebreaker Yamal. They witnessed the northern lights, polar bears, watched the ships stuck in the ice being towed, and were very cold.

In the video you can see two Russian icebreakers – “50 Years of Victory” and “Yamal” with a capacity of 75,000 horsepower.

Continue reading

Plastic Bags to Be Banned in New York

2019.06.30 /

Jesse McKinley, writing for NY Times:

New York State lawmakers have agreed to impose a statewide ban on most types of single-use plastic bags from retail sales, changing a way of life for millions of New Yorkers as legislators seek to curb an unsightly and omnipresent source of litter.

The plan, proposed a year ago by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, would be the second statewide ban, after California, which banned bags in 2016. Hawaii also effectively has a ban in place, since all the state’s counties bar such single-use bags.

Read More…

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