At the 2012 Detroit Auto Show, Ford has unveiled its new, redesigned Fusion midsize. It will come in hybrid and plug-in hybrid flavors, with improved fuel efficiency.
After months of speculation, it now appears that Germany's SolarWorld will file a trade complaint that targets Chinese companies selling their products in Europe.
by George Black, reposted from OnEarth Magazine
It was New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who made Bangalore famous. This city of seven million is the Silicon Valley of India, its technology parks and outsourcing services the driving force behind the country’s remarkable recent boom. For Friedman, Bangalore was the key to understanding the new global economy, and he came up with a snappy catchphrase to describe it, which in turn became the title of a best-selling book: The World is Flat. In this flat new world, India’s “knowledge economy” would rescue millions from rural poverty and usher them into a world of eight percent growth rates and abundant clean energy.
I came to Bangalore last month in search of this new energy economy, whose success or failure will be critical in determining the fate of the planet. But what I found was very different from what Friedman had in mind. In many ways it was more exciting; but it was also much more challenging. There’s no doubting India’s sincerity about shifting, over time, to a low-carbon future, but the vision of that future that I found in Bangalore will demand a radical change in the mindset of the government and of those who have done most to create Friedman’s Flat World.
Arriving here, as I did, from the teeming chaos of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most impoverished states, is an extreme form of culture shock. From the gleaming airport, my cab whisked me into the city along a divided highway (soon to be an expressway), flanked by tall concrete pillars (soon to be the metro to the airport). There was hardly a rickshaw or a sari in sight. Instead there were giant billboards advertising financial services, skiing vacations in Switzerland, and luxury prestige residences with golf course views. Were we really in India?
My illusions about the Flat World lasted about 12 hours — until the next morning, to be precise, when I sat down to talk to Ananth Aravamudan.
On the face of it, Aravamudan’s involvement in renewable energy is the embodiment of Friedman’s ideal. A native of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, he has lived in Bangalore for 20 years. His first job in the software business was with WIPRO, which provides information technology services for 150 Fortune 500 companies. In 1999 he left WIPRO to become one of the founders of MindTree, which has since become an important IT and outsourcing company in its own right. But in 2009, he told me, he decided he wanted to do “something more meaningful,” and joined SELCO, the Solar Electric Light Company, becoming the senior technical manager for its newly established research lab. Since its foundation in 1995, SELCO has illuminated some 140,000 households — about 700,000 people — almost all of them in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital. Those numbers make SELCO one of the world’s leading providers of solar photovoltaic panels.
I found that Aravamudan was deeply skeptical about both the Bangalore boom and its relevance to India’s most pressing energy needs. The boom is actually a bubble, he said, based on offering the world’s cheapest software development services to the world market — “but this won’t remain true for very long, as other newcomer nations will price their services more aggressively. Also, the growth of Bangalore and the IT sector has only benefited a small percentage of people, while alienating a whole lot of others.” It was true that most of SELCO’s technical experts were graduates of the Bangalore high-tech sector, but they were isolated outriders. “Almost no one here is looking at the problems right under their noses,” he said — the most urgent of these being to find ways of providing affordable, clean energy to the 400 million Indians who, without it, will never be able to enter the economic mainstream. The problem with a Flat World, you might say, is that a lot of people fall off the edge.
SELCO’s success has made its founder and managing director, Harish Hande, something of an international celebrity. Last year he was one of a dozen entrepreneurs chosen to meet with President Obama during his visit to India, as well as an invitee to the annual meeting of movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But Hande has used these elite platforms shrewdly to advance the vision of social equity that brought him into the renewable energy business in the first place. You might expect someone who has devoted his life to solar energy to praise the Indian government’s ambitious National Solar Mission, which aims to generate 22,000 megawatts of clean power in the next decade, the equivalent of more than 60 average-size coal-fired power plants. But the most Hande would say, in a World Economic Forum blog, was to damn the initiative with faint praise as “extremely well-intentioned.”
The main problem, he wrote, was that more than nine out of every ten solar megawatts would be used to feed the central power grid, which could never expand fast enough to meet the country’s rising hunger for energy. The government continued to believe that size is everything, whether that took the form of coal-fired power plants, nuclear reactors, massive hydropower schemes, or the huge thermal solar arrays that it now dreams of building in the scorching deserts of India’s northwestern states. There’s nothing wrong with these solar arrays per se, of course, especially if they lessen India’s reliance on fossil fuels. The problem, Hande said, was that the government was ignoring the wisdom that had been acquired over the past two decades about the potential for solar power in places the grid can never reach. “For those of us who have day in and day out worked hard to create sustainable businesses in the rural areas,” he wrote, “the solar mission feels like a hangman’s noose.”
The fact that SELCO is a business is important to keep in mind. “We use the word company very consciously,” Aravamudan told me. “We’re not an NGO.” The SELCO model is based on the belief that providing clean energy to those who most need it requires a sound and sustainable business model, even if the company’s major shareholders are foundations and private equity funds that are more interested in social impact than the magnitude of profits.
The entry-level package offered by SELCO consists of a single 25-watt solar panel and four lights — two LEDs and two CFL bulbs — for which it charges 7,500 rupees, about $150. That may not sound much, but in rural India it’s a small fortune. So SELCO set out to debunk a couple of tenacious myths: that the rural poor couldn’t afford renewable energy, and that a social enterprise couldn’t be commercially viable. The genius of its approach was not to lower prices (which would have meant a corresponding drop in quality), but to work out a financing model that would make high-quality technology affordable.
The biggest obstacle for potential buyers, who could usually offer no collateral, was scraping together the cash for the down payment on a bank loan (Indian banking regulations require “margin money” of 15 percent or more). The idea of a “solar loan” was unknown when SELCO started, but over time the company found creative ways of helping buyers with their initial payments, enlisting a persuasive network of supporters that included international organizations such as the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, based in Vienna, as well as local farmers’ cooperatives, microfinance institutions, even local branches of the Rotary Club. The result: 90 percent of SELCO’s customers repay their loans on time, and the reluctance of local banks has largely evaporated.
Which is not to say that SELCO’s path has always been easy. The company didn’t turn a profit until 2001, and six years later the surging global demand for photovoltaics — spurred in large part by Germany’s introduction of lavish subsidies for solar power — almost put it out of business. Supply couldn’t keep up with demand, and prices rose by almost 50 percent, imperiling SELCO’s core commitment to affordability. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation helped SELCO over the hump, but the company also decided that its future depended on more than selling off-the-shelf solar panels and lighting systems. It needed to diversify, to develop a range of new, affordable renewable technologies. So SELCO set up an R&D lab, financing it through a new not-for-profit rather than drawing the working capital from the company, which was operating on razor-thin profit margins. “That gave us the the freedom to explore projects that aren’t necessarily commercially viable yet,” Aravamudan said.
***
The lab is based 200 miles west of Bangalore, in the small town of Ujire, which is nestled in the Western Ghats, a range of misty, forested mountains dense with coconut and areca palms, coffee and rubber plantations, and scented groves of cardamom, cloves, and peppercorns. At intervals we passed through small towns with soaring, technicolor-painted temples, and crossed bridges over rushing streams. There was some potential for small-scale hydropower in this part of India, Aravamudan said, and for energy from the winds that blow off the Arabian Sea. But rivers are seasonal, and winds are fickle, and together they could barely make a dent in Karnataka’s perpetual energy crisis. Most of the power in the state comes from the giant Raichur coal-fired power plant, he told me, but India cannot dig or import coal quickly enough to keep the turbines spinning. Even booming Bangalore has to endure rolling blackouts.
The SELCO lab is run by Anand Narayan, a chemical engineer whose career path has been, to put it mildly, unorthodox: back and forth to the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he got his PhD, bracketing a spell at the elite Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and another as a disciple of the Japanese writer Masanobu Fukuoka, whose book One Straw Revolution promotes a Zen vision of “natural farming.” However, Narayan told me drily, “I found that my intellectual interest in farming wasn’t matched by my enthusiasm for the actual work.” So back he went back to Colorado, where he worked for seven years at a cell phone startup in Denver, before finally returning to Karnataka to take charge of the new lab.
The set-up in Ujire is as idiosyncratic as Narayan’s career path, and as smartly conceived as SELCO’s business model. The lab occupies a large, airy space in the SDM Institute of Technology — SDM standing for Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara, a renowned Hindu temple and pilgrimage site in the nearby town of Dharmasthala. Through donations from pilgrims, the Dharmasthala Trust has become a financial and political powerhouse in Karnataka, opening more than a dozen of these technology institutes around the state.
The lab had something of the mad inventor’s workshop, large concepts executed not only with PV panels and circuit boards but with hammer, nails, and screwdriver. Narayan’s desk was littered with half a dozen different models of solar lamps and lanterns. On the floor nearby was a selection of improved cookstoves, designed to burn firewood and cow dung more efficiently and with lower carbon emissions. SELCO had experimented with solar-powered electric fences, Narayan said, to keep animals from trampling crops and vegetable gardens, but they were too expensive for most people, costing 10,000 rupees — $200 — to fence in an acre of land. Scattered around the lab were solar dehydrators for preserving fruits and vegetables and machines to dehusk and grind grains. At one end of the room, an intern from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland was scratching his head over a miniature wind turbine, painted bright yellow, which sat on the floor like some oversize spider from the imagination of Dr. Seuss.
“Maybe we’re doing too much,” Narayan said with a grin. “But we’ll try all sorts of things to see what works.” Nine out of ten experiments would probably come to nothing, but the devices that made it through the testing process would use renewable energy in a way that was customized to local needs, and nothing would go to market until SELCO was satisfied that it was supported by a cast-iron business plan.
A few miles away in Dharmasthala, SELCO’s newly opened “energy center” was gearing up to greet the floods of pilgrims — 100,000 were expected — who would be arriving the next day for the Laksha Deepotswava, the Festival of Lights. Energy center sounds grandiose, but it was actually a modest affair: a converted 20-foot shipping container with a dozen PV panels on the roof and shelves of solar lanterns for rent beneath a smiling portrait of the temple administrator. Eighteen people had stopped by already today to charge their cell phones, and the solar-powered water purifier had dispensed more than 1,500 gallons of clean drinking water to thirsty pilgrims. The festival would bring a steady stream of customers and give SELCO a huge captive audience for its products and services. The plan now is to replicate the center at other pilgrimage sites around the country.
Again, it was hard not to be impressed by the company’s ingenuity. There are scores of clean energy initiatives in India, and while SELCO may be the best known, most share the same core philosophy: think from the ground up rather than from the grid down. Solar power may indeed be a key to India’s future, but not perhaps as the government imagines. The solutions may come from humbler places, like here among the pilgrims in Dharmasthala, where glittering solar arrays in the deserts of Rajasthan and the Flat World of Bangalore feel like visions from an alternate and more distant reality.
George Black is executive director of OnEarth, a print and online magazine published by the Natural Resources Defense Council. This is part one in a two-part series published at OnEarth.
These 10 books cover everything from basic maintenance to true adventure tales.
The Scottish Government will sign what it calls a ‘ground breaking’ deal on green energy next week.
First minister, Alex Salmond, said today (January 9) he will sign Scotland up to develop ‘tangible green energy’ products with Abu Dhabi based Masdar.
Mr Salmond will, on January 17, during a two day visit sign the agreement and take part in the World Future Energy Summit.
Precise details of the agreement have not been revealed but the Scottish side will see its Energy Technology Partnership, an alliance of 12 universities with around 250 academics and 600 researchers, benefit from the knowledge of Masdar.
While Scotland, with its weather conditions almost the complete opposite of Abu Dhabi, could serve as the perfect test bed for new renewable technologies developed by the company.
Mr Salmond said: “It is clear the work Masdar is taking forward on leading us to a low carbon society is in perfect synchronisation with the work we are doing here in Scotland.
“This is the first agreement of its kind between Masdar and an individual nation and will work towards developing further university research into renewable energy.
Masdar chief executive, Dr Sultan Al Jaber, said: “Masdar is pleased to partner with Scotland on a number of upcoming renewable energy initiatives.
“We discussed a number of areas of collaboration and I look forward to working closely with him over the coming months to move these ideas forward.”
Allen & York speaclise in Renewable Energy Jobs worldwide, related job opportunities include:
Encouraged by New York’s new marriage equality law, “Democrats in the New Jersey Legislature will reintroduce a gay marriage bill this week and have vowed to make same-sex unions a top priority two years after similar legislation was voted down,” the Associated Press is reporting:
Democrats tried but failed to shepherd a gay marriage bill through the Senate in the waning days of the Corzine administration in 2010 after Gov. Jon Corzine, a Democrat, said he would sign it. Fourteen senators voted for the bill. The measure needed 21 votes to pass.
Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Democrat who abstained, has regretted not voting ever since. He has called his inaction on the bill “the biggest mistake” of his legislative career. To indicate the importance he has since attached to the bill, Sweeney will be among its prime sponsors in the Senate along with incoming Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg and Sen. Ray Lesniak. It is being assigned the symbolic number S1, as the first bill of the new two-year session.
The measure will allow “religious institutions and personnel to opt out” of recognizing same-sex marriages and clergy members will not be compelled “to perform a gay marriage ceremony and no place of worship would be required to allow same-sex weddings at their facilities,” the report notes.
In 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Lewis v. Harris that “every statutory right and benefit conferred to heterosexual couples through civil marriage must be made available to committed same-sex couples.” The New Jersey legislature responded to the decision by legalizing civil unions, but a 2008 review commission found that “the separate categorization established by the Civil Union Act invites and encourages unequal treatment of same-sex couples and their children.” A marriage equality group is suing the state to establish same-sex marriage and will move forward with the lawsuit despite the legislative effort.
An August survey from Public Policy Polling found that 47 percent of New Jersey voters would “legalize marriage between same-sex partners, while 42 percent wanted to keep it illegal.” Gov. Chris Christie (R) says he supports civil unions but not marriage equality.
All nine Democrats from New Jersey’s Congressional delegation have written home offering their support for the marriage equality bill, noting that the state’s civil unions law “has not successfully provided equality to same-sex couples.”
Summer 2012 will see the completion of the Co-operative’s new £100m head office in Manchester.
It is designed to set a new benchmark for sustainable design in commercial buildings.
The low-energy, highly-sustainable building will have a BREEAM rating of “Outstanding” and bring together 12 Co-operative businesses whose premises are currently spread over eight separate buildings. The 500,000 sq ft headquarters will possess an array of sustainable technologies and approaches.
The offsite fabricated steel structures, designed and built by Pipe Center’s Modular Engineering business for contractor Rotary North West Ltd, have a smaller carbon footprint and generate significantly less material waste than the traditional approach of onsite assembly. The riser structures that contain and support the building’s vertical pipe work are built and tested in pristine factory conditions before being transported to site and connected up.
This enables very high quality workmanship and precision, minimising materials wastage and guaranteeing the system works first time.
In addition, this approach reduces pollution and congestion on the roads, since a single delivery by one supplier replaces dozens of deliveries by individual suppliers transporting separate components and materials to site.
It also significantly reduces the risk of accidents, as the work of constructing the risers is carried out in controlled factory conditions rather than onsite in often-difficult and cramped conditions.
Keith Fisher, Project Director for Rotary North West Ltd, says: “The offsite approach contributes to the outstanding sustainable credentials of the building. It cuts carbon, reduces waste, minimises pollution and congestion, and significantly cuts the risk of accidents on site.”
“It requires regular, detailed meetings and a clear sign off process. As a result of this close collaboration we have developed excellent working relationship with the Pipe Centre Modular Engineering team.”
Bob Hughes, who heads up Pipe Center’s Modular Engineering, says: “The Co-operative headquarters project is an outstanding example of how the offsite approach can be harnessed. It supports and contributes to the exceptional sustainability credentials of the building, with benefits for the client, contractor and the environment.”
Allen & York specialise in Energy Services jobs, related job opportunities include:
Should we worry about Chinese government subsidies to its solar industry? Or send the Chinese a thank-you note?
A group of seven US-based manufacturers of solar panels is alarmed. These manufacturers, led by Solar World, a German firm with a plant in Oregon, filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission, which reached a preliminary conclusion in December that US companies were, in fact, being harmed by subsidized imports. If the Commerce Department goes on to find that Chinese firms have been dumping solar panels on the US market at prices below their costs, it could impose steep tariffs of 50 to 250% on Chinese panels, according to this report in The Times by Matt Wald. The Chinese government provides billions of dollars of low-cost financing and free or cheap land to Chinese solar firms.
Jigar Shah
But much of the solar industry–led by Jigar Shah, the founder of Sun Edison, entrepreneur and environmental advocate–thinks this complaint is a terrible idea. Tariffs would raise the costs of solar power to US business and consumers, at a time when those are coming down; they could also set off a solar trade war that would harm other US solar companies.
As it happens, the U.S. had a trade surplus of nearly $1.9 billion in the solar sector with China in 2010, as exports of raw material and factory equipment more than offset imports of finished solar panels, according to the Solar Electric Industries Association,. What’s more, Jigar says, most of the 100,000 or so jobs in the US solar industry — he says as much as 97-98% — are downstream of the manufacturing business in project development, logistics, construction and installation.
“SolarWorld’s petition will do far more damage than good to the U.S. solar industry as a whole,” Jigar wrote in this letter to Gordon Brinser of Solar World. “Every morning, thousands of hard-working Americans put on their tool belts and go build solar power plants. Our country needs more of those jobs, not fewer.”
What got me thinking about this brouhaha was an email the other day from a California company called Solar Power Inc., or SPI, that underscored for me just how committed the Chinese are to getting their solar panels onto rooftops in the US. SPI said it had secured construction financing worth $44 million from the state-owned China Development Bank to fund construction of solar projects in New Jersey.
Why would a Chinese bank finance solar panels in the US? Well, it turns out that SPI is 70%-owned by LDK Solar, a Chinese company founded in 2005 that now says it “the world’s largest producer of solar wafers in terms of capacity and a leading high-purity polysilicon and solar module manufacturer.” LDK bought its controlling interest in SPI Solar last year in an effort to gain direct access to the US commercial market. With revenues expected to top $90 million last year, SPI is small to mid-sized developer of rooftop PV–it installed panels atop the Staples Center and the Fox Studios in Los Angeles and a Costco in New Jersey. “We’re a downstream market for LDK,” said Mike Anderson, vice president of communications for SPI Solar.
Now consider those solar panels on their way to rooftops in New Jersey–the Chinese manufacturer, LDK, gets low-cost land and financing from the Chinese government, SPI borrows from the state-owned China development bank to construct the solar arrays, the US government grants the panels a 30% investment tax credit and New Jersey’s renewable portfolio standard makes the project that much more attractive to the state’s utilities. No wonder the solar market is growing!
Supporters of the petition filed by SolarWorld, which employs more than 1,000 workers in Oregon and is the only company named in the trade complaint, argue that too much of the solar PV market is going to China. Chinese manufacturers now enjoy better than 50% of the global market for modules, up from single digit percentages in the late 1990s. Cheap Chinese solar helped drive US firms like the now-infamous Solyndra and Evergreen Solar into bankruptcy.
In a blogpost titled Educating Jigar Shah on Solar Trade, Hari Chandra Polavarapu, a solar analyst at a small firm called Auriga USA, declares: “The lower prices of solar cells and modules from China have so far served as a battering ram in destroying overseas solar PV manufacturing competition.”
“It’s true that lower prices benefit all rate payers — but if that is all there is to an economic argument, then the U.S. and the rest of the world should give up all manufacturing to China and services to India,” Polarapu writes.
My reactions:
1. Trade wars are risky. If the US imposes tariffs on Chinese solar panels, the Chinese will retaliate. They have already promised to investigate US subsidies.
2. Speaking of which, it takes chutzpah (that’s a technical term in economics) for US solar manufacturers to complain about subsidies in China since they, too, benefit from government-backed loans (yes, that means Solyndra), buy-American provisions in the stimulus package and favorable state tax treatment. SolarWorld got $40 million in tax credits from Oregon, where it employs about 1,000 people. Today’s Times has an excellent story about how the government pays for worker training programs for individual companies. Until the US brings a halt to crony capitalism (which would be good), US companies are in no position to whine when they find it elsewhere.
3. Maintaining solar panel manufacturing jobs in the US may be a lost cause. Solar cells and modules are not high tech products. They’re more like a flat-screen TV or an iPod than a Boeing jetliner. Chinese PV manufacturers benefit from efficient operations and low labor costs, according to this article in the MIT Technology Review.
4. The Chinese subsidies create a positive externality–lower carbon emissions, to the degree that solar panels replace dirtier fossil fuels. So long as they continue, we all benefit. If and when they stop, there’ll be no reason why other manufacturers can’t gear up to compete.
I’m not ready to send a thank-you note to China. But I’m thinking about it.
[Disclosure: I was paid last year to moderate an event for the Carbon War Room, which Jigar leads.]
Last fall, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) sought to kill the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution rule, one that requires coal-fired power plants to curb smog and particulate-forming pollution in 27 states. Known as a “good neighbor” protection, the rule ensures that air pollution created in an upwind state doesn’t add to unhealthy pollution levels in downwind states — like New Hampshire.
Thus, Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte (NH), along with five fellow GOP senators, joined with Senate Democrats to defeat Paul’s effort to overturn the rule.
At the NBC/Facebook GOP presidential debate in New Hampshire today, Mitt Romney was asked whether he sides with his endorser Ayotte or believes that the rule is another example of “job-killing regulation.” Following his non-committal playbook, Romney suggested, “I’m not familiar with the specific regulation as it applies to New Hampshire.” Watch it:
Romney was willing to make vague statements in an attempt to win over New Hampshire voters who support the rule, adding, “We have to find ways to keep pollution from one state overwhelming the ability of another state to have clean air.”
Members of Ford's design team reveal how recycling its textile waste into yarn is "closing the loop" on its renewable materials.
Ecomomic boycott of Iranian oil exports threatens Chinese economy and US gas prices, creates opportunity for electric cars.
Profiles of two long-time activists fighting mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.
A democratic shift in control of energy production is well underway in Germany.
A Constellation Energy power plant.
Some environmentalists said the new data show why the EPA should swiftly move to release a long-anticipated environmental assessment of dioxin, the first installment of which the agency plans to issue this month. EPA officials say they will issue a report addressing dioxin’s non-cancerous effects first and then later release a cancer-related report.
Some industry groups, including the American Chemistry Council, have urged the EPA to hold off issuing the report in what the trade association’s president and chief executive, Cal Dooley, has called “a piecemeal fashion.” Chemical manufacturers accounted for nearly 64 percent of total disposal of dioxins in 2010, though they reported a 7 percent decrease from 2009 to 2010.
There has been much industry opposition to EPA initiatives reducing pollution and toxics, including the cross-state air pollution standard. The EPA rule meant to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2012, was stayed by a court order, delaying their implementation. Groups including the National Mining Association and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers fought implementation, calling the rule overreach.
However, the New York Times reports how one coal-fired power plant has been able to install cleaner technology to meet state and EPA standards. Constellation Energy’s Vice President for Environmental Compliance Paul Allen explained they had ample time to update technology to meet new rules: ““When we started making plans for this project, we did it with the expectation that there would be a federal regime, and we still have that expectation.”
When coal and utilities last fought cleaning power plants, citing concerns about reliability, Allen similarly determined “It’s entirely possible to comply with these rules and remain a profitable company.”
The Environmental Protection Agency released the public service ad former Pittsburgh Steelers star Jerome Bettis yesterday. Bettis advocates for the new mercury and air toxics reduction rules for power plants. Bettis points out in the ad that he is one of 26 million Americans who have asthma, which is one of the respiratory illnesses linked to the emissions. With the new rules on emissions in place, it could help prevent hundreds of thousands of illnesses each year. Bettis asks the public to “join me and EPA to help tackle asthma and air pollution.” Watch:
The latest figures from the EIA show renewable energy sources overtaking nuclear power in the US, through the first nine months of 2011.
Water burst through a Brazil dam yesterday, in northern Rio de Janeiro, causing a declared state of emergency in 66 towns as they try to evacuate citizens from the floods and landslides. Local media report nine dead, and some 13,000 displaced by the disaster. Flooding, a common threat from the increasingly heavy rainfall in southeast Brazil, has affected 2 million people nationwide this year.
A Reuters video shows flooding up to homes’ rooftops:
The disaster comes almost a year-to-date after one of Brazil’s worst floods in its history, which killed more than 900 people and left 31,000 displaced.
Water burst through a Brazil dam yesterday, in northern Rio de Janeiro, causing a declared state of emergency in 66 towns as they try to evacuate citizens from the floods and landslides. Local media report nine dead, and some 13,000 displaced by the disaster. Flooding, a common threat from the increasingly heavy rainfall in southeast Brazil, has affected 2 million people nationwide this year.
A Reuters video shows flooding up to homes’ rooftops:
The disaster comes almost a year-to-date after one of Brazil’s worst floods in its history, which killed more than 900 people and left 31,000 displaced.
The average American driver, Census figures say, goes about 32 miles on any given day. Why, then do we obsess over EV range?
For those who have always wanted to ride the subway in your underwear, here's your chance.
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