Scientific American’s Breakdown of Plug-In Hybrids

This is a nice media presentation of the lifetime energy issues for plug-in hybrids. I particularly like the way it shows the regional energy markets. For people who are doing this work, it’s basic, but it’s a nice tool for high school students.

Play the presentation here.


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Richard Florida in the Financial Times on improving jobs

THIS is why I am still of fan of Richard Florida’s:

The key is to upgrade these jobs and turn them into adequate replacements for the higher-paying blue-collar jobs that have been destroyed. It has happened before. Yet the blue-collar jobs we pine for were not always good jobs: we made them good jobs. When my father came back from the second world war, his poorly paid factory job had been transformed. He was able to buy a house, put his two sons through college and participate fully in the American dream. Some of this was due to the power of unions. Most of it was because of the enormous improvements in productivity wrought by improved technologies and management techniques. The same thing can and must happen in the service sector. It is starting already. Companies such as Wegmans, Whole Foods, the Container Store, Best Buy and Zappos already account for a fifth of the top 100 best places to work in America. A typical hourly worker at the Container Store earns about $30,000 a year, not nearly as much as a GM factory worker but about 50 per cent more than the average for hourly-wage retail workers.

link: FT.com / Comment / Opinion – America needs to make its bad jobs better


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