Does your tap water taste funny? Have you tried lighting it on fire? [more inside]
posted by Sys Rq on Oct 14, 2009 - 49 comments

...the lyrics to that last song were basically taken from an encyclopedia written in the 50s, and since the 50s, some remarkable things have happened...

In 1959, a number of songs about science were released on an album called Space Songs. One of these was later covered by the band They Might Be Giants: Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas). Only one problem: it isn't--the song was based on an incorrect text from 1951. So they wrote an answer song to themselves: Why Does The Sun Really Shine? (The Sun Is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma). Bonus link: see for yourself! (previously)
posted by Upton O'Good on Sep 6, 2009 - 35 comments

Peak Oil, 1925. In 2000, 20% of new buildings will be solar equipped. By the late 1990s, 90% of the world's energy will be nuclear-generated. These and other erroneous projections are being collected as part of the Forecast Project on the website Inventing Green: The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America.
posted by Miko on Jul 27, 2009 - 65 comments

Gazprom is the greatest corporation in the world/All other companies are run by little girls. This is the most moving corporate anthem I've ever heard (and I include Devo's "Corporate Anthem" in that assessment.)
posted by Mayor Curley on Jun 9, 2009 - 45 comments

Car companies were facing a variety of efficiency and emission standards throughout the United States, from the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, On May 19th, and then an even stricter emission standard from California and 13 other states (plus DC). On May 19th, President Obama announced nation-wide new vehicle fuel efficiency standards for new cars and trucks through 2016. The goal is to rapidly increase fuel efficiency,without compromising safety, by an average of 5, culminating in 39 MPG for cars and 30 MPG for light trucks. Currently, no auto makers are meet the final standards, though some are closer than others. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on May 28, 2009 - 85 comments

Newsfilter: It's that time of the year again, though now it seems to be more serious. Russia stopped all gas supply to Europe via Ukraine on Wednesday, January 7, 2009. The EU depends on Russia for about a quarter of its total gas supplies, some 80% of which is pumped through Ukraine. At least seventeen countries are affected, many of them severely as Russia is their primary or only source of gas. [more inside]
posted by b. on Jan 7, 2009 - 51 comments

In 2009, a remarkably gifted politician, confronting a remarkably difficult set of challenges, will have to learn to say "No we can't", Guantánamo will prove a moral minefield, economic recovery will be invisible to the naked eye, governments must prepare for the day they stop financial guarantees, we will judge our commitment to sustainability, scientists should research the causes of religion, we will all be potential online paparazzi, English will have more words than any other language (but it's meaningless), Afghanistan will see a surge of Western (read: American) troops, Iran will continue its nuclear quest while diplomacy lies in shambles, the sea floor is the new frontier, we should rethink aging, (non-)voters will continue to thwart the European project -- but cheap travel will continue to buoy it -- though it has some unfinished business to attend to, and a Nordic defence bond will blossom.

The Economist: The World in 2009. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Nov 27, 2008 - 31 comments

Gas Shortages Throughout the Southeast More than a week after Hurricane Ike, there's little or no gas around much of the American Southeast. [more inside]
posted by mygothlaundry on Sep 23, 2008 - 84 comments

Fuelly tracks your gas mileage over time, helping you save fuel and expenses as you drive.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Aug 21, 2008 - 52 comments

St. Louis group Pray at the Pump is trying to lower gas prices the old fashioned way - by praying for them.
posted by ericbop on Jul 30, 2008 - 144 comments

From New York City to Seattle, Critical Mass cyclists are not having a good week. In Seattle, some question the motivations of Critical Mass, some report conflicting stories, while others suggest foul play.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jul 29, 2008 - 115 comments

According to TIME, there are at least 10 things good about high gas prices. Such as four-day work weeks, less pollution, and fewer traffic deaths.
posted by dov3 on Jul 5, 2008 - 41 comments

"Your anger just earned you a car wash, ma'am." Gas prices in California are hovering around an upsetting $4.58 per gallon. One gas station in the Bay Area is offering stress relief: a chance to dunk a Shell employee and an Express Rant for an Express car wash. The owner, Bobak Bakhtiari, tells NPR: “Cashiers are trained to really encourage all forms of expression during the rant. Well, except for throwing a chair through the window.”
posted by msamye on Jun 29, 2008 - 138 comments

The Barnett Shale, the largest onshore natural gas formation in America, is transforming Fort Worth, TX and surrounding areas. [more inside]
posted by punkfloyd on Jun 18, 2008 - 45 comments

Gasoline prices fixed. 11 Quebec companies and 13 individuals were charged today in a gas price fixing scheme. The Competition Bureau conducted a lengthy investigation into the allegations. [more inside]
posted by never used baby shoes on Jun 12, 2008 - 32 comments

Tank on empty -- how far can your car go on an empty tank? Basically a collection of statistics and stories from users on just how far they pushed their car on reserve fuel. (via) [more inside]
posted by spiderskull on May 8, 2008 - 45 comments

How far away from work do you live? How much of your pay gets used up to get you to and from work, get you around town, and pay for where you live? As gas and food prices continue to rise, "affordability" has become a more critical notion for everyday Americans. The Center for Neighborhood Technology developed their Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, which aims to help better inform renters and owners about the relationship of transportation options to where one lives.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Apr 28, 2008 - 85 comments

The Burning Crater of Darvaza. [Via.]
posted by homunculus on Mar 26, 2008 - 31 comments

The Tata Nano (pic) is a car that costs less new than the amount I've spent on gas during single car trips, recently announced to the auto market in India. The Chery QQ ^, successful , widely exported, and recognized as the Hostage Taker's Vehicle of Choice by China Car Times, is the runner-up for the world's cheapest car but is still approximately twice as expensive. Yes indeed, the price of gas is not going to come back down. So much for my coast-to-coast road trips. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious on Feb 3, 2008 - 42 comments

A two-ton 21-mpg 8-passenger V8 Chevy Tahoe? America, meet your 2008 Green Car of the Year!
posted by dead_ on Nov 27, 2007 - 95 comments

As crude hit an all time high at $96.40US per barrel this week, prices increase at pumps across the US. Regular self-serve rose 9 cents to an average of $2.80 per gallon in 11 Texas cities this week, a price of €0.51 per litre. Even Arab nations are feeling the pinch; in Syria, subsidised fuel prices were increased by 20% to €0.74 per litre. This price is "still low compared to world prices", though. The Automobile Association has a handy reference chart for Europe: drivers in the UK are paying an average of €1.37, and Danes €1.40. Latvia, though, is a European bargain at just €1.00 per litre.
posted by DarlingBri on Nov 2, 2007 - 69 comments

Photos of WWI poison gas and flamethrowers. [more inside]
posted by damn dirty ape on Sep 14, 2007 - 44 comments

A bunch of natural gas canisters blew up near downtown Dallas today. Eyewitness video!
posted by punkfloyd on Jul 25, 2007 - 94 comments

The Language of Farting
posted by empath on Jul 18, 2007 - 31 comments

gas: tractor pulls and demolition derbies. Music, a bar graph, and a clown [youtube]
posted by nervousfritz on Jan 15, 2007 - 15 comments

CitizenRe is a solar power rental company for the home. Free to install (!), a monthly rental fee is equal to what would normally be paid to the power company. Video.
posted by stbalbach on Jan 11, 2007 - 67 comments

Wayne Gerdes, king of the hypermilers
posted by MetaMonkey on Jan 3, 2007 - 31 comments

A study released by CERA has some interesting tidbits: the average motorist in 2005 used 703 gallons of gas, and drove 40 percent more than 25 years ago; the US has 1,148 registered personal vehicles for every 1,000 licensed drivers; the percentage of vehicles that are SUVs (including minivans and light trucks) is slowly going down from 55% in 2005 to 53% in 2006; the average fuel consumption for all vehicles is 19.8 mpg in 2005, a drop from when it peaked at 20.2 in 2001; and the share of U.S. household budgets going to gasoline and oil has has been relatively stable for decades, at about 3.8 percent in 2006.
posted by jaimev on Dec 1, 2006 - 18 comments

Thomas Friedman:

The First Law of Petropolitics, in short, argues that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes up in what I call petroauthoritarian states—like Iran, Sudan, Venezuela—the pace of freedom goes down. These regimes can afford to be less responsive to their people and outside pressure. And as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because these regimes have to open up to the world if they want to deliver for their people, and they have to empower their people more.

But how to lower oil prices and help freedom on its proverbial march? Many, from Alan Greenspan to Andrew Sullivan to Ray Magliozzi from Car Talk think the answer may be to . . . raise the gas tax? The Pigou Club is an ever-updated list of economists, politicians and others who have advocated Pigouvian (or is it Pigovian?) taxes to not only lower oil prices, but reduce greenhouse gases, fix the federal deficit and strengthen our national security. Though some remain more than a little hesitant to jump on the bandwagon and others remain skeptical that the movement is anything more than "just talk," this could be an idea whose time has come, especially since the gas tax isn't as regressive one would think.
posted by joshuaconner on Oct 25, 2006 - 57 comments

Green Nazis.
posted by Meatbomb on Oct 24, 2006 - 17 comments

the new urban jungle . . . is a growing movement led by cities like San Francisco, New York, and Leiden to restore active and vibrant natural systems in urban areas. Far from the eden-like depictions of nature of yesteryear, i.e. the garden of earthly delights (nonetheless, still attracting some dynamic new christian converts), the movement has morphed into today's backyard and grassroots environmental movement which is more and more a picture of hybridity, compromise, mixed-use, and ultimately, taking nature out of the walled islands of zoos, aquaria, national parks and other thick-walled institutions and offering a different kind of everyday "unmediated" community experience with the new urban wilderness. VIDEO LINK
posted by huckhound on Jul 6, 2006 - 1 comment

You may have known that Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (GA) has been a crusader for many great causes, such as HB 145, HB 180, HB 425, HB 500 and HB 637. However you may not have know that he has a second love. Which shines some light on why he has chosen to use his extensive knowledge and experience to co-sponsor H.Con.Res. 11 and H.Con.Res. 12. After listening to him explain why these two resolutions are so critical, I was almost swayed.
posted by Mr_Zero on Jun 16, 2006 - 96 comments

The Gas Price Temperature Map is a neat little Javascript feature that tells you how screwed you are next time you fill up at the pump in the lower 48.
posted by Saucy Intruder on Apr 20, 2006 - 54 comments

Iraq - All oil, no gas. A consortium of 34 Turkish companies have joined together to stop all exports of petrol / refined oil products to Iraq, because Iraq's government owes them over $1 billion that they have so far been unable to pay. Iraq's largest refinery was forced to shut down in December, after its truck drivers walked off the job due to insurgent threats. They reopened ten days later, only to shut down again after an insurgent swarm attack killed and wounded more drivers. The refinery has once more ceased activity, as their reserves of refined fuel are full and there is no way to get them to their customers. Iraq's diesel-driven power plants are undersupplied too, leading to worsening outages.
posted by insomnia_lj on Jan 22, 2006 - 37 comments

The Acoustics of Gases. The high-pitched version of your voice that you hear when you inhale helium represents a cool principle. Unlike the speed of light, the speed of sound is quite sensitive to the composition of the medium that it travels through. A gas such as helium that is much less dense than the air we normally breathe and hear in will actually cause the speed of sound to increase, a phenomenon that we perceive as a Chipmunks-like change in pitch. A couple of scientists have used this relationship between sound frequency and gas composition to invent an acoustic device for monitoring the gas composition of air. Of course , if you're a canary this is nothing new.
posted by derangedlarid on Oct 25, 2005 - 23 comments

Running on Fumes -- a fascinating essay by the Nation's Sasha Abramsky on what rising gas prices will do to poor exurban communities.
posted by digaman on Oct 4, 2005 - 165 comments

Petroleum Industry Christmas Wishlist Conservative pundits are quick to point out that no "new refineries have been built since 1976", and even quicker to blame "environmentalists". But the facts just don't support that. Refiners have chosen the environment that they do business in, and in some cases have willingly contributed to it. (Plenty of data here.) Here's why:

• The government has allowed the industry to merge, consolidate, and restrict refining capacity, thus impacting pricing, supply, and demand.
• The quest for profits has caused the need to run extremely lean supplies (ie. no stockpiles of crude - it arrives when you need it, not before) and has resulted in susceptability to wild volatility in prices, but has allowed refiners to operate at very high efficiency but with no margin of excess capacity for temporary shortages, disasters, etc.
• Oil refiners trimmed back capacity after the Oil Crash of the early 1980s and have been unwilling to reinvest in new technologies unless environmental restrictions and local fuel cleanliness mandates are reduced.

As one would expect, Bush's solutions nicely match up with the wishlists of OPEC and US refiners, who in the past few decades have largely undone the breakup of Standard Oil (via) via mergers and joint ventures. Representative Joe Barton, (R-TX), Chairperson of the Energy and Commerce Committee, incidentally up for reelection and well funded, by "the industry" through various Political Action Committees, has released a draft of the predictably named (to be found here when released) Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005 (committee discusion and webcast are scheduled for 9/28 at 8 am.) Given that new refineries are years away, there is still no solution for current prices or the (90%?) increase in prices since January of 2001.
posted by rzklkng on Sep 27, 2005 - 22 comments

Fed up with paying exorbitant prices for fuel? Try Petrol Direct - fuel delivered straight to your door!
posted by bap98189 on Sep 16, 2005 - 6 comments

Oil companies, not environmentalists behind refinery shortages. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today exposed internal oil company memos that show how the industry intentionally reduced domestic refining capacity to drive up profits. Internal memos from Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco show different ways the oil giants closed down refining capacity and drove independent refiners out of business. In related news, petroleum industry analyst Tim Hamilton showed that from January 17th to April 18th 2005 gasoline prices jumped 65 cents per gallon and refiner profits rose [pdf] by 61 cents per gallon.
posted by dejah420 on Sep 7, 2005 - 80 comments

I can't afford my gasoline.
posted by Guerilla on Sep 7, 2005 - 63 comments

"Every night MSN Autos analyzes prices from over 90,000 gas stations across the nation to show you gas prices in your neighborhood ....Don't eally know if this is as up to date as it says it is. Put in a zip code you know and see what you think. After loading a page you have to scroll down to the bottom to see the local gas station data. A timely link for U.S. readers.
posted by celerystick on Sep 1, 2005 - 20 comments

Resource wars and gas rations, what will be next ? I bet you didn't know we gobble oil like two-legged SUV's.
posted by graytopia on Aug 31, 2005 - 20 comments

Gas Money (mp3) Time for somebody to remake this novelty surf/car tune into a top 40 hit again.. ? JAN & ARNIE'S rocker from 1958. A perennial favorite covered by goofball/ garage bands like the Rip Chords, the Skeletons (a.k.a the Morrells), Cousin Al and the Relatives, and the Inner City Unit Above. ... to commemorate the new Gas Crisis. It must suck to be a Hummer Owner. ... unless it's the "Hydrogen Hummer". More covers of the song listed here.
posted by celerystick on Aug 28, 2005 - 4 comments

Gas prices too high? Try Europe. $7 a gallon? That's what drivers in Amsterdam pay. But Europeans have long adapted to high prices.
posted by Postroad on Aug 28, 2005 - 117 comments

Never use a debit card to pay at the pump: "Each day millions of Americans use their debit card at gas stations to "pay at the pump." What you probably do not know is gas stations have the right to overcharge you a certain amount to ensure they get their money. Each gas station decides how much to overcharge and hold on your account. Some put a $75 or $100 hold on the account while others only hold $5 or $10. But, these stations also decide how long to hold that money. Some hold the money for up to three days. . ." How is this even legal? Am I the last schmuck in the U.S. to find out about this? I just found out that Sam's Club (for example) charges $50 and deposits your change three days later.
posted by spock on Jun 19, 2005 - 94 comments

If you own a gas-guzzling SUV, Uncle Sam just might pay for your gas...that is if you use it 100% for business.
posted by C17H19NO3 on Apr 25, 2005 - 41 comments

A nice spread of oft maligned British food left me wondering (after a tidy breakfast of bangers and mash) if Beano was an English creation -- flatulence and all that (watch out for the first mp3) -- but apparently it isn't: the inventor appears to be American. According to this author, Henri Cartier-Bresson termed Britain "the most exotic place in the world," and I think I agree. Probably this tastes fabulous if you're hungry... please make mine well-done.
posted by indices on Feb 20, 2005 - 42 comments

Real-Time Biological Natural Gas Generation. A research lab has discovered that microbes living in Wyoming's Powder River Basin are generating methane (natural gas) through their natural metabolism of local coal beds. In relation to the many Peak Oil discussions here, could be way to get more energy for the future. (via SpaceDaily.com)
posted by zoogleplex on Nov 17, 2004 - 22 comments

Most of us are whiners, blaming circumstances for our failings; a precious few function in a self-sufficient bubble and able to shape their circumstances, never accepting the role of being a victim. Inder Parmar is such a man.
posted by semmi on Jul 31, 2004 - 9 comments

Iraqis Paying 5 Cents a Gallon for Gas While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline — a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers
posted by Postroad on Jun 7, 2004 - 47 comments