The Green Diaries

I love National Geographic. It's just about the only publication I trust. Each story is crafted and researched for months by experts, fact checked and fact checked again. It explores the unseen, wild and exotic in a way that is tangible and captivating. With some of the best photography around. The cover story this month is on biofuels. It is, as usual, a thorough and balanced view of the potential future of fuel plus excellent pub quiz knowledge like: this year's Indy 500 was won in a car fuelled by ethanol and driven by a Scot.  As a bonus, there is a complementary interactive piece online that compares the different types of biofuels. + National Geographic's Biofuel Inteactive I wonder if someday we can use our household compost to power our cars...?

We took another holiday, using the TGV instead of flying as our mode of transport, in August, as our attempts to keep air miles down continues. But as we zoomed through the French countryside at 180 MPH, we wondered how efficient is the TGV, really? Or have we just bought into the hype that it is more efficient than flying? I've never seen any statistics other than soft evidence provided by The Guardian and various news sources. We've been told by journalists that train travel is significantly greener, but with the electricity required to hurl a TGV through the countryside, and electricity plants being a major contributor to green house gases, what was a real, non-hype comparison? Or was my sudden skepticism just an excuse to trade the 5 1/2 hours on the stuffy train in for 1 hour on a plane? (Always fun going down and an absolute pain coming back.) With a little investigating, I found some statistical information comparing the efficiency of various modes of transport, based