This Bud’s Electric
Chinese company BYD is a major player in all sorts of electric powered vehicles including bicycles, buses and trucks. Anheuser-Busch is a major player in the beer business. Makes sense that the two get together in California to electrify the transport of America’s beer. This initial foray is small in scope, but it’s a vision of the near future. Is it any surprise that the largest single investor in publicly traded BYD stock is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
The 21 second generation BYD 8TT Class 8 trucks will be put to use at 4 of Anheuser-Busch’s Southern California distribution facilities in Sylmar, Riverside, Pomona, and Carson. As the name implies, the new ‘The Zero Emission Beverage Handling and Distribution at Scale‘ project aims to test the capabilities and limitations of fully electric Class 8 vehicles in beverage handling applications at a larger scale than has previously been tested. For the last few years, BYD has partnered with numerous agencies and private companies on pilots of its heavy trucks, but this new project increases the scale significantly by adding far more vehicles and more locations than have been previously tested.
The project not only includes the necessary scope for the vehicles themselves, but also looks at the electricity needed to power the vehicles. ENGIE will be installing a 958.5 kW solar array at the Carson site which will help power the local facility and offset some of the power needed to charge the new vehicles.
Upgrading the 21 trucks from traditional diesel Class 8 trucks to a fully electric trucks from BYD is estimated to eliminate 910 metric tons of CO2 per year. That’s like pulling 200 passenger vehicles off the road. It’s not going to change the world by itself, but the results of a successful completion of the project have the potential to have far reaching ramifications in the beverage transportation and distribution space and beyond.
Trump Trashing Science
Scientific research has often been problematic for those in power. Objective, peer reviewed, research is often at odds with programs and projects favoured for political purposes. And, government researchers have always had to carefully negotiate the fine line between politics and science. But, never has government research been so completely under attack than now in the era of Trump and his anti-science Republican enablers.
Safeguards meant to ensure that government research is objective and fully available to the public have been “steadily weakening” under recent administrations and are now at a nadir under Trump, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Task Force on Rule of Law and Democracy.
There are now “almost weekly violations” of previously cherished norms, the report states, with the current administration attempting “not only to politicize scientific and technical research on a range of topics, but also, at times, to undermine the value of objective facts themselves”.
The report echoes complaints by a number of former federal government officials who claim their work on areas such as the climate crisis and pollution standards was either sidelined or subverted by the Trump administration as part of its zeal for environmental deregulation.
Run Away, Run Away!
A pioneer in urban self-sufficiency is heading for the hills – well actually an undisclosed place in the country. Australian Michael Mobbs literally wrote the book on sustainable urban living, but now he is abandoning (selling actually) his Sydney home in preparation for the “total breakdown” of society that he foresees by 2024.
The 69-year-old former environmental lawyer who, in 1996, converted his two-storey 19th century Sydney terrace into one of the world’s first inner-city self-sufficient homes, is selling his famous passion project and moving to a remote coastal location to prepare for what he predicts will be impending societal collapse induced by climate change.
That is, he says, a total breakdown within the next three to five years.
First Mobbs has to do something he’s been deferring for a while: go “public”. Coming out as a survivalist who is abandoning the urban world is no easy step for a man who has authored two bestselling books on sustainable city living, spent two decades as a consultant to the public and private sector, lectured at universities, and has a model of his eco-friendly terrace home exhibited at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. Even his two adult children, who he says remain frustratingly indifferent to the apocalypse, aren’t fully across his intentions. “I’ve tried to crabwalk into this conversation with my children,” he says, sighing. “The idea that life won’t go on for them in the same way it has gone on for me is incomprehensible.”
Save the Wine
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This is not a desert apparition. It is a research vineyard, where scientists are studying how grapes can best grow in this harsh environment.
The Negev is a far cry from the temperate climates of many wine-growing regions. Yet about 20 wineries have sprouted here over the past 15 years, along with a budding wine tourism business.The researchers are focusing on this harsh environment for a reason: to study how wine grapes can grow in the desert conditions that dominate Israel. That knowledge will become even more valuable in a world with more frequent droughts and heat waves.
In addition to viticulture, Israeli researchers are studying a range of techniques to grow other crops. The Ramat Negev Agro-Research Center has about 15 hectares — or 37 acres — of research plots and greenhouses where scientists cultivate wine grapes, date palms, olives and jojoba.
In large greenhouses, researchers cultivate cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, eggplant and other vegetables, like an edible, crunchy grass called sarcocornia that thrives in saline conditions. Even strawberries are grown in long, suspended planters.
These innovations “will be more and more relevant to many countries as a result of global warming,” said Ofer Guy, an agricultural researcher at the Ramat Negev center. “Issues of saline soil and water, extreme hot weather and lack of water are going to be big problems in the global future as agriculture is forced into marginal soils,” he added.
Talk to the Trees
(Eric Knapp/U.S. Forest Service photo) |
The sugar pines on these slopes endured some of the worst water stress in the region. Winter snowpack melts earliest on south-facing slopes, leaving the trees with little soil moisture over the summer. That opens the door for the trees' tiny nemesis, which would deal the fatal blow.
"Here you have some really good mountain pine beetle galleries," Maloney said, as she peeled the bark off a dead sugar pine to show winding channels eaten into the wood. "Like little beetle highways."
Pine beetle outbreaks are a normal occurrence in the Sierra. As the beetles try to bore into the bark, pine trees can usually fight them off by spewing a sticky, gummy resin, entrapping the insects. But trees need water to make resin.
"The tank ran dry, and they weren't able to mobilize any sort of resin," Maloney said.
But next to this dead tree, Maloney points to one towering above, with healthy green pine needles. Somehow, it was able to fight the beetles off and survive the drought. As she's found more and more of these survivors, Maloney has studied them, trying to figure out what their secret is.
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