The latest installment of Knight Rider was greened up for NBC’s Green is Universal week. The eco-friendly run involves select NBC shows — like the current version of Knight Rider — getting a fresh coat of green paint. Low VOC, of course! Read the rest of this entry »
The new-for-2009 Mini E electric car is undoubtedly one of the most highly-anticipated cars being released next year. Initially the car will only be offered to a select group of 500 people in the Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey metro areas who will be chosen by Mini to provide the exact set of testing conditions Mini engineers want to evaluate.
Bay Area leaders are hoping that a combo of public and private investments can turn the region into The Electric Vehicle Capital of the U.S., by building out a $1-billion electric vehicle infrastructure. The group involves Silicon Valley’s Better Place and a group of wide-eyed politicians: California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Read the rest of this entry »
Citing Oregon’s environmental leadership in developing the transportation infrastructure of tomorrow, Ghosn also said that Nissan would be releasing their first electric car for the US market in Oregon in 2010. After releasing electric cars in Oregon in 2010, Ghosn then affirmed that Nissan-Renault will bring an “entire lineup” of zero emission electric cars to the worldwide market by 2012.
I was in the overflow room watching Ghosn on a big screen when he announced all this, so nobody was clapping, but this is definitely some of the biggest news to come out of the LA Auto Show this year — if not the biggest.
The vehicle builds on the same hydrogen technology being used in the FCX Clarity — Honda’s “production” hydrogen fuel cell vehicle currently being tested in limited release by a couple hundred hand-picked owners in the US, including celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis.
It’s a fact. Corn ethanol has lost its luster. Its intrigue has gone from, say, Sean Connery in Dr. No, to the “let’s-just-pretend-they-never-happened” Timothy Dalton years. Each day now brings news of another ethanol plant closure or project put on “hold.” In fact, the stream of bad news for corn ethanol has become so steady that it has largely faded into background noise — just another sign of a crashing economy.
In reality, however, corn ethanol was set up for a crash before the faltering world economy gave it the impetus to go over the edge. I’m not suggesting that corn ethanol is going extinct, just that, as some industry experts have put it, corn ethanol is going through a “major adjustment” where the outcome will be large swaths of consolidation and efficiency improvements within the industry.
In a way, corn ethanol is finally coming of age. To put it crudely, little Timmy has stopped having wet dreams and gone out and met some actual women. Read the rest of this entry »
For the third year in a row, The New Oxford American Dictionary has selected an eco-themed word as its word of the year. “Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” as Oxford defines it, is “an attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.”
The term, which Oxford says was coined by Wayne Gerdes of CleanMPG back in 2004, has received newfound attention in the last year thanks to sharp increases in gasoline prices and a political squabble about national energy policy and the benefits of properly inflated tires.
Billionaire American entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens is optimistic that the Obama administration will bring the United States’ energy infrastructure into the new millennium by implementing his plan for energy independence.After eight long years there is finally a cause for hope here in the United States. George Bush may still be in office, but right now all America’s problems are President-Elect Obama’s to solve (see Obama Recession, thanks Rush), but he seems ready for them.
In a random survey of 804 American adults conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates and commissioned by General Motors (PDF), there is broad support for bailing out the the American auto industry — and even broader support of President-elect Obama’s plans to make sure “the American automobile industry continues to be able to operate.”
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