Per Capita Davis: More about hydrogen
The prior column was about hydrogen, specifically hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles, but there wasn’t room, only 900 words, to talk about both the obstacles hydrogen faces and also some of the potentially positive developments for the future of hydrogen as a fuel. So, this…
Per Capita Davis: Whatever happened with hydrogen?
Every few years or so there seems to be a renewed excitement about the potential for using hydrogen as a non-fossil fuel. Usually, the conversation is about cars. Once you get it into a car’s fuel tank, it can power the car without producing any…
Per Capita Davis: Innovating for the future
I’ve been searching high and low for innovations that could help power a more energy-efficient and sustainable future. There’s a lot out there, some very much closer to being a concept than an actual product or process. Still, the sheer number of ideas being pursued…
Per Capita: To the moon and back
Whether technology can save us from the climate crisis is an open question. It seems relatively certain that improvements in technology will inevitably at least help reduce carbon emissions, or maybe even capture some of them from the atmosphere, but hoping for or anticipating a…
Per Capita Davis: Speaking for the trees
Planting massive numbers of trees as a strategy to combat the climate crisis can be said to have its roots (groan) in a program begun in Africa but which has grown (groan) into a global effort involving governments and organizations all over the world. According…
Per Capita Davis: What’s the cost of silence?
Not too long ago it was fashionable for those who deny or doubt the climate crisis to argue that although scientists had early on predicted that one of the first visible effects of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be increases in extreme weather…
Per Capita Davis: We’re in a senior moment
Today, as this column is being written (June 1), is the official opening of a hurricane season that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has estimated will be quite active. It comes, as scientists have predicted and proved, that increasing heat stored in the oceans…
Per Capita Davis: Lessons learned can be easily forgotten
As a country, we periodically experience shocks, sometimes big ones that change our national psyche. The Great Depression, World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Recession, the attack on 9/11 come to mind as examples. In each case, our country was different after…
Per Capita Davis: Sickness and the pandemic
It may be just my opinion, but it seems there’s a sickness that has taken hold in our country. There’s also a pandemic. The pandemic attacks the lungs. The sickness attacks the brain. The pandemic interferes with breathing. The sickness interferes with thinking. The pandemic…
Per Capita Davis: Two elephants in the room
At the risk of inflicting my internal turmoil on you, I confess to a huge ambivalence in making any connection between the pandemic and the climate crisis. Do we really need two elephants in the room at the same time? One that has been with…
Per Capita Davis: Some good news in a time of anxiety
I’ve been thinking a lot about “sustainability” the last few weeks and intended to write about it. But that would take me down a sort of dark road, and in these strange times I feel a need for something positive, lighter, hopeful. So here is some…
Per Capita Davis: Putting gas guzzlers in the rear-view mirror
So how’s it going with efforts to turn the auto industry into makers of primarily electric vehicles and getting drivers the world over out of their fossil-fuel cars and trucks? There are many moving parts to making such a huge change and to date it’s…
Per Capita Davis: More pieces of the puzzle
I’m continuing to clean out my inbox and I don’t mean that to diminish what I conceive to be the value of this and other similar columns that don’t address a single idea, theme or thread. The items below are pieces of the puzzle of…
Per Capita Davis: Keeping up with the news on the climate crisis
So much is happening in the world that relates to the climate crisis. It’s hard to keep up, much less figure out whether more of the news is positive or negative or whether we should look at the aggregate as a glass half full or…
Per Capita Davis: Big changes are coming our way
When I approached The Enterprise 12 years ago about writing a column on what was then referred to as “climate change” I struggled to find an appropriate title for the column. While watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” I was struck by how many times…
Per Capita Davis: The year 2020 and 20-20 vision
It’s easier to accurately judge past actions and decisions looking back than when taking those actions or making those decisions. As they say, hindsight is always 20-20. We are on the cusp of a new year and a new decade. Looking backward, it’s clear that…
Per Capita Davis: From the mailbag
The expression “from the mailbag” never anticipated emails, for which there’s no bag, and though a few suggestions for topics for this column still do come via snail mail, most arrive as emails or texts. Here are a few topics that came my way recently…
Per Capita Davis: New report on world energy outlook
There are several highly reputable organizations tracking the science of the climate crisis and issuing regular reports. Probably the best known of these is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. Another, right up there at the top in terms of reputation…
Per Capita Davis: Taking stock at the end of 2019?
Another year is ending, and another is beginning. Typically, New Year’s Day is when we can all reboot, put the past behind, make resolutions, and look forward with bright optimism. I confess I instead feel a significant trepidation about the future. In some very important…
Per Capita Davis: A small but sticky issue
It seems a little weird and awkward to write about small things influencing the climate crisis and sustainability when so many huge events are happening all at once. Consider: the Amazon is aflame, scorching millions of carbon-absorbing trees to make more room to grow more…
