Mountains of Almaty

Pictures from the past several weekends.  First bunch is from Big Almaty Lake.  The lake is about 15 miles to our south at 8000 ft (2500 m). Sergey took us one afternoon after church.  The lake serves as the main source of Almaty's drinking water.  It also helps with avalanche and flood control.

The second bunch of photos is from downtown Almaty.  We went shopping for some souvenirs at Zoom.  Zoom is a department store building with several hundred vendors inside.  From there, we went to the Zaloni Bazaar looking for a mop.

Last bunch is from Chimbulak - Almaty's ski area about 30 minutes to the south of downtown.  The base ski area sits at 8100 ft (2300 m).  We hiked up one area to almost 12,000 ft - where the oxygen molecules are scarce!

The shocking truth about electric cars - The Globe and Mail

..... Electric cars aren’t necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles require large amounts of electricity – so much that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he doesn’t know how he’d get it. “If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails,” he said recently.

And if the extra electricity isn’t generated by renewable energy, then overall carbon dioxide emissions will go up, not down, Prof. Smil says. “The only way electric cars could reduce global carbon emissions would be if all the additional electricity needed to power them came from carbon-free energies.” He also makes the essential point that the world’s energy infrastructure is based on fossil fuels. Changing that will take decades....

The shocking truth about electric cars - The Globe and Mail