Brian Carr notes in an article on the Daily Fuel Economy Blog that

The new national average gas price is up to $3.21 per gallon, which is up 3.25% over the past week, 11.85% over the past month and 38.95% since the beginning of the year. Today’s price is also 11.75% higher than what the price was exactly one year ago.

This is interesting as the price point of $3.00 pre gallon seems to have offered little resistance to the upward movement. 

This contrasts with the UK where the £1.00 per litre price point is a huge psychological one. 

1 US gallons = 3.7854118 litres

1 British pounds = 1.9737 U.S. dollars

So the price of a gallon of gas in the UK is currently about $7.17

The goal should be to move towards different fuel sources and I am sure that many people would like to do that sooner rather than later.  Lets hope that the development of the technology and support structure to deliver it is available soon. 

The site by Chris Jordan is a series of images that looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. 

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

Chris’s only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images.

Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

This is a great post on 10,000 mashmallows about the future of the internet…

By Steven Phenix, Viametric Principal

I am the future of the Internet and according to Pew Internet and American Life Project report from last week people like me — Web 2.0 participants, gadget hounds — only make up 8% of the general population. For now, that is. And it will change rapidly, faster than any socio-technological trend before.     Here’s why the future belongs to people like me: more

Little Madeleine McCann remains missing and her family needs your support. 

They have set up a website to keep awareness high.  Which can be found at Bring Madeleine Home

 There is also a banner ad that can be displayed on the web sites that is downloadable. 

Please take the time to consider Madeleine in your thoughts.

There’s nothing wrong with reasonable packaging;  we all want the stuff we buy to be clean and undamaged.  But retail packaging has a dual purpose — protecting a product, and getting you to buy it. The latter case is where things get out of hand.

How many times has this happened to you…  You order a small light weight item online and would reasonably expect to receive the item wrapped up in some packaging, but what you actually receive is the item you ordered wrapped up in more “protective marketing material” than the can possibly be needed.

A site that has some great examples of this can be found at Overpackaging.com, while more on this story can be read at LighterFootsteps.com

To date, Toyota has put one million hybrids on the road, and it’s just the beginning. Three of the biggest obsticals for hybrid technology are cost, availability, and Lithium Ion technology, and Toyota is expecting all those dominos to fall within three years.

Relentless cost reduction efforts lead Toyota to speculate that their margin on hybrids will equal that of petrol-only vehicles by 2010, and by 2020, Toyota expects that all of its vehicles will have the hybrid synergy drive system. The next Prius is expected to utilize Lithium Ion technology, which would be a big step forward in the chronology of hybrid powertrains. Reports Autoblog

Yet hot on the heels of Toyota’s announcement Honda has confirmed that beginning in mid-2009, a new hybrid will be launched.

Production is expected to be around 200,000 units per year, which is a substantial sum considering that Toyota’s popular Prius sold 186,000 units across the globe in 2006.

The pricing of the yet-to-be-named Honda hybrid is planned to be below the current Civic hybrid and styling will supposedly be heavily influenced by the Remix concept that debuted in LA last November.

Last week, in Las Vegas Domino’s Pizza started testing pizza deliveries using Zap! Xebras.

These are supplied by the Electric Vehicle Company  so that Domino Pizza can test them.
 

Jim Stansik, Domino’s executive vice president of Franchise Development, said in a statement that, “..today it is not uncommon to have your Domino’s pizza delivered by bicycle, scooter or car around the world. Looking toward tomorrow, Domino’s is committed to also being a responsible consumer of our planet’s natural resources by testing the feasibility of using electric vehicles in our stores.”

This is quite funny in some respects as the UK has had 3 wheeled cars for many years, with the most famous being used by “Trotter Independent Trading Company”.  

“In one of the most unexpected conversions since Saul of Tarsus hit the road to Damascus, Rupert Murdoch is turning into a green campaigner.”  Reports The Independent.   

He is aiming to make the whole of his worldwide operations carbon neutral and setting out to “educate and engage” his readers and viewers about global warming.

While he is endeavoring to make the tactical changes in the organisation he is looking to make a bigger impact with the main thrust of the campaign.

“..to inspire people to change their behaviour” through films, television productions and news operations. It will aim “to weave this issue into our content, make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun”.

We look forward to seeing the fruits of his labour…

With all the work being done on reducing carbon emissions it is simply amazing to hear that the energy giant Eon applied to build the first new coal-fired generating units in the UK in 33 years.  

Now Medway Council in Kent is considering the application.

Amazingly each of the units Eon proposes to build would emit more carbon dioxide than 24 of the world’s lowest emitting countries combined.

What is worse the design doesn’t have the capacity for heat capture and have an efficiency rating of just 45 per cent, meaning that most of the energy is lost as waste heat before it even reaches the transmission lines.  This compares with countries like Denmark who are achieving up to 90 per cent efficiency in their power plants.

For more…

A new generation of wind turbines is being engineered to accelerate the uptake of this technology in providing renewable energy.  The Loopwing in a new design from Japan that does just that:

The design has a number of interesting features which will help overcome some of the issues that are raised today.

Firstly the looped design of the blades means that it is almost silent in operation.  It can generate power at much lower wind speeds and it comes packed with safety features.  This is something that I would like to have on my property.