Alternative Fuels Now

How can we cut our energy use for commuting? What methods are working for you? What methods make most sense in our current credit environment? This is mostly an open thread, to give people an opportunity to talk about what is and isn’t working for them. If the economy is sputtering, peak oil is around the corner, and hurricane related shortages are becoming more common, these methods are going to more and more important in the days ahead.

Imagine strolling a few steps in your underwear to pick fresh tomatoes from the garden, without ever leaving your apartment. All that and more in an urban desert, no less. Israeli architectural firm Knafo-Klimor recently won an international competition for their design of a modern apartment building that incorporates interior gardens into its residential units. The high-rise has 4 columns, the exterior two consisting of standard living spaces, while the two interior form contiguous, vertical gardens, attached to each individual apartment.

There’s a new way of wiring your lights…and it doesn’t involve wires. Pretty freakin’ cool actually. Right now, your light switch has a physical connection to your light. When you flip the switch, a circuit is completed and the light turns on.

LCD and plasma TVs are actually more efficient per square inch than those old-fashioned CRT screens. But that doesn’t mean they consume less electricity. In fact, simply because they are, on average, so much more gigantic than old CRTs, they consume far more electricity.

There’s hybrids…and then there’s hybrids. And while this isn’t the first time we’ve seen buses that can ride on train tracks (two years ago we wrote about these in Japan) this is definitely the coolest concept we’ve seen.

Can a hybrid engine be shrunk small enough to fit within the very narrow confines of a motorcycle? Honda thinks it can do it and if I was going to bet $700 billion of taxpayers’ money on that gamble, I would place the bet on Honda.

How can we cut our energy use for commuting? What methods are working for you? What methods make most sense in our current credit environment? This is mostly an open thread, to give people an opportunity to talk about what is and isn’t working for them. If the economy is sputtering, peak oil is around the corner, and hurricane related shortages are becoming more common, these methods are going to more and more important in the days ahead.

Imagine strolling a few steps in your underwear to pick fresh tomatoes from the garden, without ever leaving your apartment. All that and more in an urban desert, no less. Israeli architectural firm Knafo-Klimor recently won an international competition for their design of a modern apartment building that incorporates interior gardens into its residential units. The high-rise has 4 columns, the exterior two consisting of standard living spaces, while the two interior form contiguous, vertical gardens, attached to each individual apartment.

There’s a new way of wiring your lights…and it doesn’t involve wires. Pretty freakin’ cool actually. Right now, your light switch has a physical connection to your light. When you flip the switch, a circuit is completed and the light turns on.

LCD and plasma TVs are actually more efficient per square inch than those old-fashioned CRT screens. But that doesn’t mean they consume less electricity. In fact, simply because they are, on average, so much more gigantic than old CRTs, they consume far more electricity.