Firlapalooza

Some interesting developments I learned of recently on the climate change front.  First of all, be sure to check out the site of Tesla Motors, a start-up car company based in California which is working to develop a commercially-viable electric car that appears to look very promising, even offering solar cells on top of the vehicle to provide additional charging during the day for shorter trips (on top of what is charged from a regular electrical outlet).  This small company may even be able to trump the short-sighted double-dealings which larger motor vehicle businesses have had in the past (such as General Motors, which actually had introduced its own electric car for a while, but canned it, since it would most certainly interfere with the profitability of its bloated SUV division (among other things), as covered by this recent documentary.  Overall, it gives me a sense of optimism to see that there are actual companies out there who are intending to fully divest us of our planetary dependence on the internal combustion engine.  Unanticipated and unintended future negative effects of electric car technology aside, it’s a start.

In other news, there is something I had already considered in my mind as a possible effect of climate change, and I don’t recall if it was covered in the recent documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, but from a chemical standpoint, it certainly makes sense: the more CO2 there is in the overall atmosphere, the greater the amount available to be naturally absorbed into the water, since it is a soluble compound.  One might think, that’s great! now there’ll be less of that unwanted, climate-disrupting, tailpipe-effluent in our atmosphere!  Unfortunately, when CO2 dissolves into the water, it combines with H2O to form an acidic compound, H2CO3, or carbonic acid, of soft-drink fame.  So, just like in the atmosphere, the CO2 which has entered the oceans has not had benign effects either, since its acidity is affecting the delicate balance of the water’s pH level, which will of course tamper with the survivability of numerous marine organisms, and consequently, us.  Come take a look at the Globe and Mail article about it right here (and also here).

Thus, I wish the best of luck to Tesla Motors’ success, but perhaps they should develop a car which runs on acidic seawater and decaying coral reefs (maybe this guy has some ideas?).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006, and is filed under Automobiles, Environment. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.