Great developments toward clean energy

I've been thinking and reading more and more about energy use and
how we can fix the current mess. A big part of that relies on changing
the kind of cars we drive, how we fuel them, and how we produce energy
in general. And there's good things happening. Oh, and ethanol and
hydrogen cars are NOT the answer!

GM plans the Volt electric car ...hopefully this time they won't collect the fleet of cars and then smash and shred them to prevent anyone from driving them!

Toyota will offer a plug-in hybrid by 2010. This will allow the user to do most daily commutes with no gas needed.

AirCar Factories is developing a car powered by compressed air (great video ) ...their hybrid version is projected to be able to travel from LA to New York on ONE tank of gas!

T. Boone Pickens can be a total schmuck. He heavily financed the inaccurately named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), who lied
repeatedly about John Kerry's military service. Pickens then offered $1
million to anyone who could disprove these lies. A group of veterans
sent Pickens detailed military records disproving TEN points claimed by
the SVBT ...and Pickens refused to pay up. But his Pickens Plan
holds a LOT of promise. It's hard to trust the guy, but this is a very
good plan for renewable energy, and since Pickens stands to make a
bunch of money from it, I DO trust him on this one. Check the web site
and get familiar with the plan.

A FANTASTIC plan - perhaps the best option for saving our planet so far - comes from a company called better place.
The idea is to replace the current oil-dependent cars of the world with
electric cars. The cars have a range of about 120 miles on a current
charge. One could charge the cars at home and at many other locations,
and for longer trips, one would pull into one of the many stations at
which one swaps out the battery - fully automated station - in under 3
minutes. The idea is to treat cars like cell phones: you pick the model
you want, sign up for a pay-as-you-go plan or a set number of miles per
month or other options, and then that's it. The plan is to ensure that
user pay LESS for the electric car and usage than they do today for
gas. Sounds crazy, right? But Israel, Denmark, several other countries,
and the State of Hawaii are on board. Renault-Nissan Alliance is making
the cars. Go to the better place site and read about it. AND better place is ensuring that the energy used
to power the cars comes from renewable sources like wind and solar (NOT
nuclear ...Adam Putnam, who is the US House rep from my district, refers to nuclear power as 'renewable' ...I was
there at a candidate forum in Bartow Florida last week and heard him say it ...incredible ...nuclear
is NOT renewable energy!!!)

We have some great progressive candidates (Kevin Beckner - for County Commissioner, Doug Tudor for US Congress, Barack Obama) from the local level on up
to the Presidency. And there's a dramatically increasing number of
innovative and DOABLE ideas for reducing or eliminating our use of
fossil fuels, creating jobs, and cleaning up the environment.

Good things are happening.

Car powered by compressed air

Many very promising advances are being seen in various technologies. My Portland buddy Barry pointed out this one:

They're also working on a hybrid that would use the fossil fuel to compress air for the car's engine. The projected range of the hybrid vehicle would allow one to drive from Los Angeles to New York ...on a single tank of gas!

Driving a fuel-efficient car: 6 months in

I've been driving the Yaris for a little over 6 months now. I've tracked every tank of gas, and my average mileage is about 39mpg. I've gotten as high as 42mpg and as low as 36, but the average over the long haul is 39 miles per gallon, so that's not bad.

Except that things could have been so much better.

This evening Shirley and I watched the movie Who Killed the Electric Car. Back around 1980 I worked in a music store with a guy who drove one of these. I have no idea what the car cost or who made it, but it was fine for my colleague, who lived fairly close to the store and just needed easy around-town transportation. And there were various electric cars produced by the big auto makers, but through the mix of oil company greed, auto company short-sighted greed (quite rational focus on profit if you don't give a hoot about national security nor the environment), Bush administration actions, and other schmuckery ...the electric car efforts were killed.

Toyota was among the big companies that killed their electric car projects (an electric RAV4) once the US companies were stopping their own projects. But Toyota and Honda did move forward with their hybrid cars (US manufacturers abandoned hybrid work, only recently making some efforts at hybrid catch-up). So now, of course, Toyota is king of hybrids with the Prius, and will quite probably have a plug-in hybrid Prius in 2009. Sigh. The US companies had the skills, they had the technology, and they had the momentum ...but they blew it in favor of what we've seen far too often: the quest for short-term profits, at the exclusion of longer range thinking.

Hydrogen powered cars is just a ridiculous idea (from a consumer standpoint that is). Best estimates are that with a few miracles, they might be viable in 30 years. Or we could have had widely available electric cars on the road today.

Not being able to afford a Prius (and actually I would have preferred a Honda Insight if they were still on the market), I opted for the car model that got the best mileage at the time, and at an affordable price: the Yaris. And I've not been disappointed.

I especially look forward to 5 or so years from now when I truly believe we will have not only plug-in hybrids, but also a decent selection of completely electric vehicles available.

Freecycle: lightened my load :)

During the past year we've switched to using an electric mower instead of a gas-powered mower, electric grass edger and string trimmer instead of gas-powered devices, and disconnected our gas-fired water heater and installed a solar water heating system. A side effect of this is that our garage was now cluttered with the devices that we were no longer using. I was enjoying a beer Thursday evening with some friends and mentioned that I needed to get rid of this stuff. Smitty suggested I list the stuff on Freecycle. Duh! I'd heard of Freecycle a year or more ago and had forgotten about it. It works like this: instead of tossing something in a landfill, thereby polluting the ground and taking a useful item out of circulation ...'gift' it on Freecycle. Or if you need some item, check Freecycle and perhaps someone has the item you need and is ready to pass it on to a new owner.

In the words of Freecycle:

Please be gentle in your expectations, gracious in your giving and appreciative for the things you receive. Please treat each other as you want to be treated and remember, you are making a difference, one gift at a time!

How cool is that? So I popped on to the Tampa Freecycle group. I listed the items earlier today, and by mid-afternoon the items all had new homes. I have more room in the garage, and these perfectly good devices will continue to provide useful service. Words really can't express how much I enjoyed this.

Now I'm looking around seeing what else we can release :)

CatalogChoice.org: reducing paper waste

From their website:
Catalog Choice is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in
your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save
natural resources.

This is pretty cool! I just signed up today. I created a free account, listed our address and the names to which we receive snail mail. I then went through the rather extensive list of catalogs (using the search feature a time or two) and selected the various catalogs that the US Post Office delivers to our mailbox - and that we then deposit directly into the recycle bins. As Shirley and I were talking about it, we kept remembering more junk that comes to us. So now, ever so slowly over the coming months, the volume of junk mail that is delivered to us should diminish. The number of wasted trees will be reduced a little. A little less fuel will be wasted in the transport of the catalogs. And the companies who produce the catalogs will be wasting less money, since we don't buy from these catalogs anyway!

So lighten your load. Go sign up and reduce your junk mail.