air pollution

There are two kinds of traffic, neither of which is particularly pleasant. The first is moving traffic. It's slow, tedious, and something many of us are unable to avoid on our daily commutes. Movement is movement though, which makes stationary traffic a hundred times worse. Not only are you not...

Daniel Yergin is one of those authors who writes major works. His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Prize is nothing less than the definitive history of the rise of the petroleum industry, and his latest, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, starts where that book left off...

You'll no doubt have heard of Greenpeace. The high-profile, occasionally militant green organization very much believes in action over words when it comes to coercing companies into considering the environment. Volkswagen too is well-known, as one of the world's largest car producers, supplier of...

We all know that electric cars have zero tailpipe emissions, but the claim that electric cars move the pollution from the tailpipe to the power station chimney has long been a cornerstone of arguments against the electric car. But in an unusually candid moment at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan...

There's no doubt that car manufacturers have worked incredibly hard over the past few decades to make their cars cleaner than ever. Modern cars produce a fraction of the pollutants of their predecessors - as little as a tenth of those in 1970 - and they're improving all the time. We've seen the...

Presumably following studies on whether bears really do defecate in the woods and to which religion the Pope actually pertains, The Greenling Institute in California has released a new report suggesting that expensive electric vehicles aren't benefitting communities of low income. The new study...

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that nanoparticles present in unfiltered diesel exhaust can lead to blood clots, heart attacks and strokes.

If you've ever visited a museum or a manufacturing plant, you've probably heard a tour guide say something like this: "And if you laid all these bottles end-to-end, they'd stretch clear across the state of Kansas!" Through time and repetition, certain comparisons have become standardized, so that...

Cars that consume less fuel have many benefits, including lower gasoline costs. Now it turns out that they also bring significant public-health benefits, reducing health-care costs and premature deaths from cardiopulmonary causes. The challenge is that the costs and benefits aren't equally spread...