The man who mows our grass came by this evening to pick up his check and ran with his truck over a 2 1/2 foot copperhead snake in our driveway. It was clearly an adult and it was a beautiful snake with tan and brown hourglass markings. It was still moving and a couple of […]

America’s addiction to oil is one of her most serious problems. It is a burden on the economy because it drains trillions of dollars from this country every year. And it is the Achilles’ Heel of the economy because oil is getting more and more expensive, and eventually we will run out of oil. At […]

So I guess I survived the first day back at work after our awesome, two-week vacation in Iceland and Germany. We are still processing the sights, sounds and cultural impressions. Iceland struck us as a very cool and quietly very powerful place. Huge geological forces are at work here, glaciers and volcanoes shape this island. […]

Recombination or mutation, that seems to be the big question regarding the avian flu (H5N1) virus in Viet Nam. In yesterday’s edition of the journal Nature, Klaus Stöhr reports that the WHO has not received enough samples of the virus to judge the genetic changes it has found in the few availabe samples. With so […]

Plasmodium Falciparum is an ancient, accomplished killer on a global scale. It is one of the parasites that cause malaria, the disease that brought the Roman Empire to its knees, killed peasants and popes, and continues to ravage the population of many tropical regions of the world. Only massive use of DDT in the 1950s […]

Diesel-electric hybrid is a total no-brainer. They should just run those trucks on biodiesel! That would cut emissions even further. The FedEx Express E700 hybrid electric vehicle decreases particulate emissions by 96 percent and travels 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than a conventional FedEx truck, reducing fuel costs by more than one […]

Sunday was a gorgeous spring day, but Laura had to work, and so I took the gang out on little road trip to the Biofuels Coop in Chatham County. When we got there, Lyle was just showing a group of people around the farm and the biodiesel production. While the kids were chasing a goat […]

It is spring in North Carolina. Finally. We are all completely drained from the deprivation and hardship of six weeks of Winter, i.e. six weeks of temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, 9 days of “hard frost (below 32 degrees Fahrenheit), and two “snowstorms” (average of 1.5 inches of snow) that shut down everything. But all […]

The WHO keeps finding humans infected with the bird flu in Viet Nam, and the death rate now stands at 49 out of 79 in SE Asia. We now also know that getting the bird-flu vaccine into mass production will take 3-5 years: [T]he Department of Health and Human Services had awarded a $97 million […]

Have you fixed your bicycle yet? The end is near! The end of cheap gas, that is. More and more people are acknowledging that peak oil is indeed upon us, possibly in the next few years. That means that just as fossil fuel consumption is skyrocketing, we may be hitting the top of the Hubbert […]

The HSUS estimates that at in the last 3 days, 5 hours 62,800 seal pups have been clubbed to death in Canada. I urge you to join the boycott of Canadian seafood until they stop this butchery. HSUS’s Director of Canadian Wildlife Issues is out on the ice off of Prince Edward Island, documenting how […]

… formerly known as “EARTH” … The good folks at the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment project took the extremely utilitarian definition of the Earth’s relationship to the human race as a “Provider of Ecosystem Services” and analyzed this relationship painstakingly in their report, which is presented on www.greenfacts.org: 2.1 Ecosystem services are the multiple benefits provided […]

Since this morning, Canadian sealers slaughtered an estimated 4200 baby seals, as the annual seal hunt on Canada’s Atlantic coast began. By the end of the this year’s hunting season, sealers will have clubbed and skinned 300,000 seal pups. According to the US Humane Society, this is the largest commercial slaughter of marine mammals on […]

The U.S. Navy is the world’s largest user of diesel equipment. Now they are making a commitment to using biodiesel: Beginning June 1, 2005 all U.S. Navy and Marine non-tactical diesel vehicles will be required to operate on a B20 (20 percent) biodiesel blend as part of the military’s efforts to increase their use of […]

NC State reseacher Mary Schweitzer went to Montana on a dig, cracked a dino bone and found “fresh” dino meat: Schweitzer found the tissue in the thigh bone of a well-preserved T. rex that her former graduate school adviser excavated from a remote area of northeastern Montana along the Missouri River. The bone was broken […]

These guys: Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems, sell a $800 conversion kit to turn a diesel vehicle into a greasecar that runs of pure vegetable oil! Makes a lot of sense – after all the original Diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil. Burning veggie oil dramatically reduces emissions, and uses a renewable resource. […]

Looks pretty good …. … and runs on vegetable oil (20 percent, for now).

Today, I finally bought my new car, a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta GLS TDI. Two weeks ago, our mechanic confirmed that our 1995 Plymouth Neon had a blown headgasket. So I started shopping for a replacement. I found mine on Autotrader.com, for sale from a private seller in Cary for a very reasonable price. They had […]