Jonathan Crowe

The next generation of the Toyota Camry will only be available as a hybrid in North America. One might expect that the move to an all-hybrid lineup by the fifth best-selling vehicle in the U.S. might make an actual dent in total U.S. gasoline consumption. Jalopnik does the math, calculating the difference at about 48.4 million gallons (183.2 million litres) per year of Camry sales. While one commenter points out that U.S. gasoline consumption is about 135 billion gallons per year, it’s still a reduction of two percent. Each year the Camry is sold. (Other things being equal, viz., that sales numbers remain constant and that the net effect is equivalent to all Camry owners buying a new, hybrid Camry.) Two percent ain’t nothing, especially when it isn’t the only thing going on.

Because something is also going on in the e-bike space: a total of 280 million electric mopeds, motorcycles, scooters and e-bikes are now on the road, and that, according to The Conversation, is already having an impact on oil demand: four times as much impact as electric cars. That’s because they’re not displacing regular bicycles so much as they’re replacing mopeds and scooters—many of which had dirty two-stroke engines, so that’s another benefit.

Mirrored from Jonathan Crowe.

From last July: CityLab looks at the “darker side” of urban tree-planting initiatives. Simply planting a million trees—or, say, two billion—is not enough; those trees have to survive to maturity for their environmental benefits to be realized. “Keeping new trees alive in the city is tricky. And it’s not cheap to plant trees right. Too often, when cities set their eyes on planting an impressive number of trees, Hutyra says, they underestimate the investment—natural resources, labor and funding—needed to keep them alive long enough to see those gains.”

Mirrored from Jonathan Crowe.