Monthly Archives: June 2018

Amasa Delano, ecologic destruction, and the face of Empire

I should like to highlight here (see also TomDispath.com version) a remarkable essay by Greg Grandin, one that contrasts two of Melville’s characters as faces of Empire: Captain Ahab and the historical sealing captain Amasa Delano, who partook in the massive late eighteenth century extirpation of seal populations in the South Pacific for fur, which was used a luxury item for the wealthy, and who put down a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish slave ship.  Delano viewed himself as a moral man, one “who has a knowledge of his duty, and is disposed faithfully to obey its dictates.”

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Electrified Drivetrains Still at ~3% Market Share

Unfortunately, as reported by the EIA, electrified drivetrains—hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs), plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs), and battery electric vehicles (BEVs)—still make up only about 3% of new vehicle market share, a share that has been stable for the last five years, with HEVs continuing to account for most electrified drivetrain sales:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36312

Although fuel economy has increased somewhat for conventional vehicles in the last few years, compared to typical gasoline vehicles, lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions are generally 30-60% lower for most alternative drivetrain vehicles (with some larger luxury vehicles exceptions to this rule).

Stay tuned for a more in-depth comparison of the top-selling HEVs, PHEVs, and BEVs…

Paper of the Day: Poore & Nemecek (2018): Reducing food’s environmental impacts…

Synopsis

A new analysis drawing on 570 studies with data covering 38,700 commercial farms shows dramatic variation both worldwide and within-region in the environmental impact across all major foods, but confirms that beef in particular and animal products in general are responsible for the greater part of food’s impact on earth, which adds up to 31% of global warming emissions (including non-food agriculture), and 43% of ice- and desert-free land.  Supplementary material available for free (and is very comprehensive), while the main article is for subscribers only (here).

Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987-992.

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The Inaugural Post

Welcome to EnvironMath!  Hopefully this will become a useful record of (sometimes) mathematically oriented reviews of topics in the environment (and perhaps other areas).  To get started (and to shamelessly self-promote), I’m adding multiple (free) excerpts from my new book, A Fair Share: Doing the Math on Individual Consumption and Global Warming.