It is important to realize that the way we power our vehicles today is based on the legacy of energy discoveries of the 1800s.  Oil was first taken out of the ground in Pennsylvania in the 1860s.  When the automobile industry came into being some four decades later, petroleum was the first candidate for the energy source.  Even though the quintessential American inventor Thomas Edison did build an electric car, electricity was not as wide spread as it soon would be, so the power of the Rockefeller oil cartel won the day.

Today we are using the energy source discovered 150 years ago to get us to work and to the grocery store.  Do we use candles to light our homes?  Do we use tubes to power our radios and TVs?  Do we cool our houses with blocks of ice?  No, no and no!  So why do we continue to blindly define transportation energy on an 150 year old discovery that we know is causing climate change, funding terrorism and is in finite supply?

In the last few decades, Western Science has, as it has penetrated ever smaller particles, come to the conclusion that everything is energy.  Taking a look at energy from this point of view it strikes me as incredibly narrow to think of fuel, or energy as fossil fuel. That is just a small slice of what is available. If everything is energy then let’s look elsewhere, everywhere.

There are people around the world who are doing just that.  A …

Last Friday, June 15, 2007, a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere was lifted out of its’ underground vault near Tulsa Oklahoma.  It had been buried on June 15, 1957 to both commemorate the 50th anniversary of Oklahoma becoming a state, and to serve as a time capsule for the  100th anniversary in 2007.  This led me to immediately think about what might be put into the ground today that would be unearthed in 2057.

First however, some interesting facts about the unearthed Plymouth. The car had been buried in a structure that was built to withstand a nuclear blast.  When the car was unearthed, it was discovered that this structure was no barrier to ground water, which had seeped in and converted the dirt around the car into mud, making it look like a victim of a flood.  This of course made me think about all the nuclear fall-out shelters that were being built in the late 1950s and early 1960s when a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real perceived threat. An ever present threat far greater in scope than the terrorist events we are fearful of today. Well, since radiation moves quickly into water, it looks like the shelters that were going to save the survivors of a nuclear holocaust wouldn’t have done much good.  This suggests that our general perception of our ability to protect against bad events can be woefully over confident.

The time capsule aspect of the Plymouth was of obvious interest.  The car had been buried …

We are all more aware of global warming than we were years ago.  As a country we passed through the tipping point of awareness in the last year.  We have a better understanding of what it is that we each do to contribute to global warming, and a number of us have taken action to lessen those contributions as much as possible.  We now need to change some of the language we use in this area as it will help us to continue to change our thinking and perhaps our behavior. 

I have heard a number of relatively environmentally aware people speak about their cars with a MPG reference.  People speak about ‘doing their part’ by driving a car that is rated as a 30 mpg vehicle, or that they just bought a hybrid to help cut down on harmful emissions and to save on gasoline.  That is great, no question.  What is needed now is for those people, and all of us, to not rest on our laurels based upon what we have purchased, and move to how we use what we have purchased.

The question should be “What is your carbon footprint?” not what is the mpg rating of your car.  For example, let’s assume a green thinking consumer has just bought a car with a 30mpg rating, having shed her big SUV that only got 15 miles per gallon.  That’s great, but she should ask herself what her carbon footprint is before she wears even a scarf of self …

In my last post I wrote about GM and the presentation it made to some of us in the media about the new battery technology they are developing along with several other companies.  At the end of that post I highlighted the two distinct lines of challenging questions that have come up in response. 

I will quickly restate these two before moving on to address them.  The first challenge to GM about their commitment to creating a new battery technology for vehicles is to directly question how serious the GM commitment is.  How can the people who were identified as launching and then ‘killing’ the electric EV-1 be taken seriously?  The second challenge is to the commitment of GM to not come out with a true electric car until there is the ‘perfect’ battery technology to do so.  In other words, since it will take several years to perfect the lithium ion battery to meet all the necessary criteria for use, why not just come out with vehicles that use the current nickel-metal hydride technology so that ‘green’ cars can be put on the road much sooner.

To restate simply:  Are you guys for real, and why wait for perfect when good is available? 

Is GM for real?  All evidence points to a truly serious, committed company that has set as one of its core missions to reinvent the actual DNA of the automobile.  First, GM is being extremely open to the press, bloggers and the world at large about what they …