Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
This green subsidy for car makers is just a disguised corporate bail-out
George Monbiot, The Guardian
While all eyes were fixed on the banking bail-out, a bucketload of public money was quietly sloshed into the pockets of another undeserving cause. Last week, George Bush agreed to lend $25bn to US car manufacturers. It’s a soft loan, which will cost the government $7.5bn. Few people noticed; fewer fought it. The House of Representatives approved the measure by 370 votes to 58. The great corporate bail-out is spreading like the plague.
It has already crossed the Atlantic. Yesterday European car makers demanded that the EU hand them €40bn ($54bn) in cheap loans to match the US subsidy. Where will the public spending spree end?
The motor companies in both Europe and the US claim they need these loans to help them go green. They will invest the money in a new generation of environmental technologies, which will allow them to meet the efficiency standards their governments are setting. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents … but how strange this green enthusiasm seems, now that there’s the smell of public money in the air. For the past 10 years the car manufacturers have driven every useful green initiative into the wall…
(7 October 2008)
Saving gas, beyond the car
Eric Evarts, Consumer Reports
Taking a hard look at the relationship between peak oil (when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached) and water shortages paints a grim picture.
Oil supplies from non-OPEC sources have already peaked, according to Dr. Peter Wells, an oil industry consultant who works for Toyota. Drilling may produce new sources, but they are likely to be much smaller and many times more expensive to extract than existing wells. Producing energy from untapped sources (such as shale and tar sands), as well as producing alternative energy requires massive amounts of water that the U.S. currently doesn’t have.
Back-to-back presentations on these subjects at the recent Toyota Sustainable Mobility Seminar were enough to dampen the car enthusiasm of a room full of automotive journalists. In the final analysis, nothing is ever likely to be as cheap or convenient as the light, sweet crude oil of years past.
This raises two key questions: As a society, where do we go from here? And if you’re in the business of making cars, how do you plan your future?
The answer to both questions involves learning to use less gas – and soon.
(7 October 2008)
Peak oil sighting at Consumer Reports.
Carrying Copenhagen: the wonders of the cargo bike
Mikael Colville-Andersen, Bottleneck Blog, Los Angeles times
The transportation of goods and children through an urban landscape is a universal need. In Copenhagen many our of citizens choose the self-propelled transport option and cycle to work, school and on errands.
On any given day you’ll see people moving things about on their bikes. A ladder, a newly-purchased bean bag for the living room, heavy bags of groceries dangling from the handlebars. It’s what we do.
In Copenhagen, however, we have our own version of the SUV. We call it ‘ladcyklen’ or ‘the cargo bike’. Often there are goods too large or cumbersome for convenient bicycle transport and if you have a child or two or three, they have places to go and things to do and you are the one who has to get them there.
In Denmark the three-wheeled cargo bike is the vehicle of choice for moving things about and the cargo bike market here continues to enjoy steady growth. A cargo bike is a generic term for any bicycle that is designed to carry ‘stuff,’ whether it has two wheels or three.
The necessity for cargo bikes is as old as bike culture itself.
(30 September 2008)
Suggested by Big Gav. Photo of a cargo bike at the original. -BA
