AVOID HUGE TRUCKS and SUV'S they're DANGEROUS and NOT SUSTAINABLE............Size Matters — Enormous EVs Reduce The Benefit Of Driving An Electric Car. The electric car revolution is caught up in building large, heavy vehicles, which compromises their advantage over conventional cars. But as a recent article in the New York Times points out, bigger EVs have more embedded carbon emissions than smaller ones, mainly because of the battery manufacturing process. In fact, today’s largest EVs — the Hummer EV, Ford F-150 Lightning, and the other electric pickups coming from traditional American manufacturers — may have more total emissions than the most efficient gasoline-powered vehicles. Whether they are powered by gasoline engines or run on electricity, bigger vehicles require more energy to make and to move, Alissa Kendall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis tells the New York Times. A battery-electric pickup truck may have half the carbon emissions per mile of its internal combustion powered equivalent, but it still may have higher lifetime emissions than some smaller, lighter, and more efficient passenger cars. Of course, there aren’t that many small to medium size passenger cars available for purchase today, especially in America. Over the past decade, Americans have increasingly shifted away from cars and toward SUVs, pickup trucks, and crossover vehicles. Some industry analysts estimate SUVs, pickup trucks, and vans could make up 78% of new vehicle sales by 2025. Heavier Vehicles May Pose A Safety Hazard.  What Good Is An Electric Car That Is Not Efficient?.......The one true thing about an electric car is it is far more efficient than a car powered by an infernal combustion engine. The Hummer is dismal when it comes to efficiency, however. We often hear about peak oil, but shouldn’t we also be talking about peak car? Building 78% large cars is simply not sustainable for the Earth. We need to electrify everything, but we also need to mine and refine fewer raw materials and ship them shorter distances. Just going electric so we can all drive a 4-ton battery on wheels everywhere we go is not a solution to global heating. It’s a fool’s mission. We have to do better, and pretty damn soon, too. The Takeaway....... We write about the electric car revolution daily, but we understand that there are a finite number of resources in the world and they have to be used wisely if we hope to avoid a climate catastrophe of our own making. That means we are in favor not just of converting every car to electricity, but also having fewer cars on the road using precious resources for personal transportation.We often hear about peak oil, but shouldn’t we also be talking about peak car? Building 78% large cars is simply not sustainable for the Earth. We need to electrify everything, but we also need to mine and refine fewer raw materials and ship them shorter distances. Just going electric so we can all drive a 4-ton battery on wheels everywhere we go is not a solution to global heating. It’s a fool’s mission. We have to do better, and pretty damn soon, too.       https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/19/size-matters-enormous-evs-reduce-the-benefit-of-driving-an-electric-car/    ......and there's more.......                   The Hidden Danger of BIG Trucks Pickup trucks are getting larger and becoming a hazard to pedestrians and drivers of smaller vehicles  The hood of a Gladiator is 45.5 inches high, CR's measurements show. Marketed by Jeep as a vehicle that can "conquer" the road, it's part of a cultural phenomenon of enduring consumer demand for bigger everyday trucks, some of which don't come with important safety features as standard equipment. Research has found that modern pickups—which can have tall hoods, large blind spots, and stiff body-on-frame designs, and which can often exceed 4,000 pounds—are particularly deadly in crashes with pedestrians and smaller, lighter vehicles.......and there's more......https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/

Were the Impossible and Beyond burgers a fad, or is plant-based meat here to stay? Alternative meat products have gotten a lot better. They’re not nearly good enough. A few years ago, plant-based meat seemed poised to take over the center of the American plate. Sales growth for cow–free burger patties and meatless sausages soared 18 percent in 2019, and 45 percent in 2020. Investors poured billions of dollars into hundreds of startups’ coffers to help them create the next best imitation. Some of the world’s largest meat companies, like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, hitched their star to the meat-free wagon too, launching their own products. In 2019, Beyond Meat had the most successful stock market debut of any company since the 2008 financial crisis, and later that year, the Impossible Whopper landed on every Burger King menu in the country. But the hype set up unrealistic expectations for just how big a bite animal-free meat could take out of the real meat market. The meteoric growth couldn’t last forever. Recently published sales data found that meatless meat sales in grocery stores declined by 1 percent in 2022, after zero growth in 2021, putting a yearslong ascent into question. The sales analysis, which was commissioned by the Plant Based Foods Association and the Good Food Institute — the two leading organizations that advocate for plant-based meat and dairy — also found that unit sales of plant-based meat, or the number of products sold (as opposed to total sales in dollars), declined by 8 percent. Conventional meat had a better year, with sales up 8 percent and a 4 percent dip in units sold, according to another analysis. While the sector is falling short of investor expectations, I think it’s far too soon to write its obituary. Beyond and Impossible burgers only became widely accessible a few years ago. Taking a longer view, it’s notable that the industry managed to nearly double US sales from mid-2017 to 2020 (it grew even faster globally).

The reality of where the industry is headed is probably somewhere between imminent demise and world takeover: Jennifer Bartashus, a food industry analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, predicts plant-based meat sales will grow by a modest 1-2 percent in the second half of 2023. The uptake of plant-based meat matters beyond the ups and downs of Wall Street because it appears to be, for now, one of the best bets to chip away at industrialized animal agriculture, which subjects billions of animals to terrible conditions and is a leading driver of climate change and biodiversity loss. Much of the plant-based sector’s trouble boils down to two basic problems: It’s still much more expensive than animal meat, and most of it doesn’t taste close to the real thing. At a minimum, it’ll have to address those problems, but that alone may not be enough. The plant-based industry and its boosters also need to help usher in a cultural shift around the centrality of meat from animals in American diets. What put plant-based meat’s meteoric rise on pause?  Let’s start with alternative meat’s sticker price.Year-over-year inflation has hit grocery bills harder than almost any other part of the economy, reaching 8.5 percent in March (compared to 5 percent for the broader economy). That’s caused shoppers to trade pricier meats, like seafood and steak, for chicken and cheaper cuts of beef. This could also explain part of the plant meat slump, as it costs around three times as much per pound as chicken, almost twice as much as pork, and is comparable to or costlier than beef......read on  https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/4/17/23682232/impossible-beyond-plant-based-meat-sales ......and......Sign up for the Meat/Less newsletter course. Want to eat less meat but don’t know where to start? Sign up for Vox’s five-day newsletter full of practical tips — and food for thought — to incorporate more plant-based food into your diet.  

Consumerism plays a huge role in climate change A new study shows that the stuff we consume -- from food to knick-knacks -- is responsible for up to 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s easy to hate on consumption. It turns otherwise intelligent people into manipulable drones, leads to rampant privacy violations, helps people like Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton get disgustingly rich and powerful, encourages advertisers to shove garbage like this in our faces, and culminates every year in a tradition so degrading and horrific that it forces us to question whether we all really did die after Y2K and this is actually hell. But here’s one more thing: A new study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that the stuff we consume — from food to knick-knacks — is responsible for up to 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use. So, you know, get that Amazon trigger finger ready, because you’re gonna want to do some comfort shopping after this.“We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses. … But between 60-80 percent of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well,” Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and lead author on the study, said in a press release.  According to the study, about four-fifths of the environmental impact of consumerism comes not from direct behaviors like driving cars or taking long showers, but rather from sources further down our products’ supply chains. The amount of water that goes into a hamburger or frozen pizza, for example, proved much more significant than showering and dish washing habits. This is great news, of course, because everyone knows how easy it is to track products from the obscure mines that they sprang from to the local Bed Bath & Beyond (not)......read more........https://grist.org/living/consumerism-plays-a-huge-role-in-climate-change/

SUVs raced to a new milestone in 2019, surpassing 40% of all car sales worldwide for the first time. The world’s roads, parking lots and garages now contain more than 200m SUVs, eight times the number from a decade ago. SUVs’ share of car sales in the UK has tripled over the past 10 years, in Germany last year one in three cars sold was an SUV. missions analysis commissioned by the Guardian illustrate, for the first time in detail, how much worse for the climate SUVs are than smaller vehicles, and how they have helped transform our cities. In the US, SUVs emit 14% more carbon dioxide than small passenger cars on average, a wider disparity than in the European Union but smaller than China. These differences add up to a hefty toll in emissions – all of the SUVs sold in the US just in 2018 will in a single year emit 3.5m tonnes more in CO2 than if they were smaller cars. Over a 15-year lifetime of the vehicles, the extra pollution is on a par with the entire annual emissions of Norway. Over a 15-year lifespan, the SUVs sold in the US in 2018 will emit 429.5m tonnes of CO2. In China, the emissions will amount to 482m tonnes of CO2, while in the EU the vehicles will expel 129m tonnes of CO2. Combined, these emissions will be three times higher than what the UK emits from all sources in a single year. “To avert the worst of the climate catastrophe, the transport sector needs to be completely decarbonized,” said Sebastian Castellanos, a researcher at the New Urban Mobility Alliance who calculated the emissions. “With the explosion in SUV sales, we are moving even farther away from our goal of decarbonizing the sector.”     https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/suv-conquered-america-climate-change-emissions