Installation of the Pollinator Garden
April 22, 2023!
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Eliot’s Creation Care Team leads a demonstration in Newton Centre to protest Bank of America’s major lending to fossil fuel companies — joining forces with Third Act, which was protesting also three other major banks, also lending largest amounts to fossil fuels, JPMorgan Chase, CitiBank and Wells Fargo.
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Regenerative Gardening
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Time to Consider an Electric Vehicle (EV)?
Lookin' Good
And more improvements coming up!
An Israeli company has announced new batteries for electric cars that can be recharged in just five minutes. Cost and range, sometime barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), no longer matter, according to Daron Myersdorf, CEO of StoreDot, the company that made the breakthrough. By using silicone instead of graphite in developing the new Store-Dot batteries, overheating of batteries would no longer be an issue. Dozens of other companies are also developing fast-charging batteries, using varying compounds and with varying battery life. Another issue concerning people has been the mileage range an EV has before needing a charge. If charging stations can offer five-minute charges and that charge can take you 100 miles, the anxiety about limitations on driving distance will no longer exist. By 2025, StoreDot aims to deliver 100 miles of distance with a five-minute charge, and is now working with BP to deliver it. President Biden has big plans for putting in new charging stations, more high-powered than those used today, promoting trade-ins, and switching to electric cars for the entire Federal fleet. |
Are EVs are better for the environment given the high emissions rate for EV car production and dismantling. Let's look a little closer.
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![]() Putting all this data together, the math tells us that gas engine vehicles indeed emit more CO2 over the lifetime of the car than EVs. In Australia the carbon footprint of an EV vs gas engine vehicle is 273g/km vs 333g/km (an 18% improvement over gas engine vehicles). In NZ the EV carbon footprint is just 128g/km (a 62% improvement over gas engine vehicles) due to the high percentage of renewable energy used to charge the battery.
Efficiencies in manufacturing, battery technology (like the one described in the opening paragraph), and more readily available renewable energy sources for recharging will continue to make EVs an even smarter choice. But for now, it seems merely a smart choice. For more information on electric vehicles, see Marcia@GreenNewton.org or Google, and to learn much more about the new batteries, see The Guardian, Jan 19, 2021, Electric Batteries With 5-Minute Charging Times, by Damian Carrington for Environmental Education and https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-the-environmental-footprint-of-electric-versus-fossil-cars-124762, by Md Arif Hasan and Ralph Brougham Chapman, Victoria University, Wellington, 10/15/19. --Ginny and Natasha |
Subject: Public Citizen’s Climate Change WorkThe Ralph Nader organization, Public Citizen, is working to incentivize investment in clean energy and disincentivize investment in dirty energy by forcing polluters to account for the cost of climate change and the impacts of their pollution. This is also true for insurance coverage — increase the liability that companies have for their pollution. They believe that financial regulators already have this power given the risk overinvestment poses to the financial system as a whole.
To support the important work being done by Public Citizen on their effort to change the major insurance company, AIG, you can sign this petition: HTTPS://publiccitizen.salsalabs.org/aigpetition/index.html To read Public Citizen's Climate Roadmap for U.S. Financial Regulation click here. |
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