living green

Photos from Plug In America's inaugural parade

Saturday morning, EV RIDRs and Obamamaniacs converged on the Santa Monica Civic Center to advocate for electric vehicles and celebrate President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration. The Inaugural (EV) Parade West, led by Plug in America, attracted over 70 electric and hybrid vehicles to zoom the city streets in PEBO's honor. Four Tesla Roadsters, 40 Toyota RAV-4 EVs, one converted Porsche Speedster, and even one converted EV Hummer H2 (!?) joined the festivities.

(To the New York Times editorial board: I believe these are the folks who will drive Detroit's fuel-efficient and electric vehicles. That is, once they are actually available.)

Check out some parade photos below the fold.

The green films on show this year at Sundance

It's a reel good time in Park City, Utah: The 10-day Sundance Film Festival kicked off there on Jan. 14, and five of the 32 documentaries have environmental themes. An additional 50 eco-related films were submitted but didn't make the cut -- more greenish submissions than in the past two years combined, said a Sundance programmer. It's no wonder that budding eco-filmmakers clamor to get in, as An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? got their starts at Sundance.

Here's a rundown of this year's greenish offerings:

 

The Cove: This eco-thriller exposes the slimy underbelly of the cultural infatuation with dolphins. Activists -- led by Flipper's trainer -- sneak cameras into the cove of a major Japanese dolphin supplier and document the sketchy treatment of the animals. Which probably includes making them pose for neon Lisa Frank merch.

 

 

 

No Impact Man: You may've heard of Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, the New Yorker who attempted to go carless, eat organic and local, and not create any waste (including toilet paper) for a year -- and who made his wife and kidlet go along with him. If his wife is really as "espresso-guzzling [and] Prada-worshipping" as she's made out to be, this could be a tasty greenish slice of Simple Life-esque schadenfreude.

 

 

Automakers parade EVs in Detroit, Ontario Betters itself, and more green auto news

• Detroit: It's still around, and as long as the feds continue to give transit short-shrift, we'll be driving and bailing for years to come. But in honor of our societal shift toward fuel efficiency, the automakers have some brand new electric vehicles and hybrids they have been showing off this week at the North American International Auto Show, Jan. 11-25.

From the third-generation Prius to the Dodge Circuit to the Mini E, talk of fuel efficiency and battery-life replaced praise for horsepower and chrome. Thank goodness for the 505-horsepower Revenge GTM-R or we might confuse ourselves and our cars with those subdued European models.

While electric vehicles stole the auto show, Toyota's executive vice president, Masatami Takimoto, said in an interview with the New York Times that Toyota would produce a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle by 2015. GM's lead engineer on the Volt also thinks Hydrogen is the fuel of the future -- I guess he hasn't read Joseph Romm's opinions on the matter. GM's Larry Burns, vice president of research and development and strategic planning, thinks Toyota has a lock on hybrids and that the Americans need to "change the game," but he didn't specify if that meant a focus on hydrogen.

From Jan. 17-25, NAIAS will be open to the public. If you live in Detroit, don't miss these 10 vehicles of interest, as advised by Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press, and when else will you take an i-Miev for an EcoExperience 10-mph test-drive a la Michigan Economic Development Corporation?

(Side note: Jalopnik nearly ran into the Sen. Bob "I'm against the bailout plan" Corker (R-Tenn.) in their little electric mobile command center. You can -- hee hee -- watch the video here.)

In other news ...

• Like Israel, Denmark, Australia, California, and Hawaii before it, the city of Ontario, Canada, will now be a Better Place.

• Ferrari is now offering research grants for automotive technology that reduces vehicle weight and CO2 emissions.

Who's killing the plug-in hybrid?

This East Bay Express story is a must-read article. The same folks who decided the hydrogen highway was the road to the future now very well might kill the plug-in hybrid conversion industry.

I'd say we should send them a copy of Who Killed the Electric Car?, but chances are they only have Betamax.

From President to Pep

1. Yes, we garbage can

   This week, someone with designs on the future will take the old and broken and turn it shiny and new. We speak, of course, of Nancy Judd. But we've got high hopes for that other guy, too.

   

   Photo: Katie Maccauly

DDT, other contaminants persist in Columbia River

As the Columbia River runs its 1,200-mile course from a Canadian glacier out to the Pacific Ocean, it passes by one nuclear production complex, 13 pulp and paper mills, and countless agricultural areas, mines, and sewer outflows from major cities.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that the U.S. EPA recently found that the river -- which drains a 259,000-square-mile basin covering seven U.S. states and part of Canada -- is carrying "unacceptable" levels of contaminants like mercury, DDT, PCBs, and PBDEs.

Although other river systems like the Mississippi and the Colorado contain comparable levels of DDT, PCBs, and mercury, an EPA official said that reducing pollution in the Columbia basin would be a high priority. This is good news for many Northwest tribes who rely heavily on Columbia River fish for their diet. It's also important news for the region's salmon populations, which use the Columbia and its tributaries as spawning ground.

So how did these contaminants end up in the river? Here's a rundown, courtesy The Oregonian:

How often do natural and unnatural flights collide?

A plane crashes into the Hudson River. By great good luck, all 155 people aboard survive. The cause of the accident? “A double bird strike.” So how often do birds, going about their wild-thing business, bring down our massive metal machines? More often than you might think — and yet, way less often than you’d […]

Modernizing the auto fleet will benefit the earth and the economy

The auto industry and its customers are suffering from unprecedented market conditions. Within the past six months, the industry has been hit with three unforeseen market problems: $4 per gallon gasoline, frozen credit markets, and, now, a recession that is spurring job losses and dampening consumer confidence. These factors combined to drive down U.S. new vehicle sales by 18 percent in 2008 (compared to annual sales in 2007) -- this equals nearly 2.9 million fewer cars and trucks sold in our nation in 2008.

As Congress and the Obama administration consider solutions to our economic problems and long-term challenges of enhancing energy security and fighting global warming, modernizing our nation's automotive fleet would go a long way toward accomplishing those goals. Currently there are nearly 250 million cars and trucks on American roads and highways. Many of these are older vehicles, manufactured prior to enactment of emissions standards that help make the new vehicles sold today dramatically cleaner and better for our air quality.

In the industry, we often say that the best thing you can due to reduce emissions is to purchase a new car. Why? Because today's vehicles are 99 percent cleaner than vehicles of the 1970s, thanks to a dramatic reduction in smog-forming emissions. In fact, in recognition of the progress automakers have made in reducing smog-forming emissions, California has gone so far as to eliminate smog checks for new vehicles.

Must-read: Van Jones and the English language

I'm a big fan of people who are persuasive advocates for clean energy -- and an even bigger fan of those who keep trying to improve their language skills.

And that brings me to Van Jones, founder of Green for All, an organization promoting green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged (and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress). He is the subject of a must-read New Yorker profile by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?"

This is the part that got my attention:

He spends a lot of time listening to speeches -- the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he's got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.

"Ronald Reagan I admire greatly," he once told me. "You look at what he gets away with in a speech -- unbelievable. He's able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That's very hard to do."

Precisely. We are constantly being told people have the "gift of gab" as if it is something you were born with. Facility with persuasive language is a skill that is developed and improved through practice and study.

Lincoln didn't become our most eloquent president through happenstance. He consciously decided to educate himself in rhetoric. Indeed, much as Van Jones listens to Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln studied, listen to, memorized, and recited the works of the greatest master of rhetoric in the English language -- William Shakespeare.

Churchill himself studied the art of rhetoric and the figures of speech all his life and at the age of 23 wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric," that explains: