07.31.2K6: SUVs: From trucks to cars

As gas prices fly higher and higher, Americans are reevaluating their driving habits, and avoiding the big gas-guzzling SUVs like the plague. So what are they buying instead? They are still buying SUVs... but the SUVs they are buying are the new "crossover" SUV, built on a car frame.

The first SUVs were built on truck platforms, mainly to allow the automakers to take advantage of the lighter emissions regulations for trucks... they could produce the vehicles for less, thanks to the lack of emissions equipment, but they could sell it for more, because... well, look at all the vehicle you get. They made big big profit. You got a truck. (Suckers.)

But today, no one wants to buy trucks getting 12MPG, no matter how spiffy those leather seats are. So the automakers are switching their efforts into creating SUVs based on car platforms. Car-based SUVs, sometimes called Sports Crossover Vehicles or SCVs (Chrysler's PT Cruiser was one of the first, but there are over 40 models available today) get much better mileage than their truck-based counterparts, and they are also significantly smaller, satisfying those SUV drivers that decided they really didn't like such huge vehicles when it came to parking, garaging, or navigating tight neighborhood roads.

When the PT Cruiser came out, and I heard it was built on the Dodge Neon platform, I remember saying, "Now why the hell can't all SUVs be like that?" Well, thanks to the gas crisis (created in no small part by all those SUVs), they may eventually all end up as what they should have been in the first place.

Took friggin' long enough.

07.23.2K6: How far off was he? Carter's energy plan

With all the talk about energy problems and conservation, it would do well for many of us to remember that this is not a new development... we've been on this track for a long time. And considering how long we've been on it, we've made very little progress towards getting off of it.

Remember Jimmy Carter? Sure you do: 76th Governor of Georgia, 39th President of the United States, winner of a Nobel Prize, and presently an activist lending his sweat and support to Habitat for Humanity, a grassroots organization devoted to showing people how to build homes for themselves. During his administration, he created the Department of Energy, combining numerous individual and generally unfocused agencies into a cabinet-level organization, which he charged to get this country out of the disaster it found itself in after the Arab oil embargoes and the 1973 Energy Crisis.

Carter outlined 10 steps to getting this country on a smarter energy track. They were as follows:

1. We can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.
2. Healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
3. We must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems —wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.
4. We must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.
5. We must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.
6. Reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.
   (He called #6 the cornerstone of the policy)
7. Prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.
8. Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.
9. We must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.
10. We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.

As you can see, Carter knew very clearly what was going on, and he was actively taking steps to save us from the crisis. I was particularly drawn to numbers 1 and 10, as they are perhaps the most important things in this list: The statement that the government must take charge, and Americans must understand the urgency of this problem and support it; and that the steps taken then would lead us into the next century.

Unfortunately, this was begun over 30 years ago, and most of us know that very little has been done to reach any of these 10 steps today. In fact, America adopted a very different 5-step program:

1. The Department of Energy was broken back up by the Reagan administration immediately following the Carter administration, and changed their focus to the monitoring of our nuclear arsenal's radioactive waste;
2. The Reagan government further assumed a hands-off policy related to energy regulation and conservation;
3. The car companies switched from production of efficient autos (which they made less profit from) to gas-guzzling luxury trucks (which they made massive profits from), while putting up purposely ineffectual efforts at alternative energy R&D;
4. The oil companies were allowed to buy up alternative energy companies and stagnate their R&D efforts; and
5. The public was kept behind a Madison Avenue-generated smoke screen of ignorance and disinformation, paid for by the oil and car companies.

Imagine where we would be today, if Carter's 10-step program had in fact been enacted. Be aware of how disasterous our 5-step response turned out to be. And think about the future we face, if we keep following America's 5-step plan, and do not embrace Carter's 10 steps immediately.

07.17.2K6: Everyone wants to be "Green"

It's in the movies. It's on the talk shows. It's on prime time TV. It's on the newsstands, on the covers of Time and Newsweek. It's being discussed in the offices, on the subways, at the coffee shops, and by the water coolers.

Everybody's suddenly into "green."

Before some of you cheer, be advised that it's not what you think. Most of these people are not being altruistic, or just suddenly waking up to the real dangers of global warming, worldwide pollution, or the wasting of our valuable and limited resources. Most of them are simply reacting to the impact on their bottom line. With the reality that rising fuel prices manage to impact almost literally every aspect of our lives, from fuel costs, to the rising costs of all delivered goods, to the rising costs of services that depend on those delivered goods, there is literally no place to hide, and no way to ignore the impact on our wallets. This is affecting our business profitability, our paychecks, our bills, and our savings (if any) at the end of the month.

So, now everyone wants to conserve. And even politicians have picked up on that message, and are strapping on their Nikes with the intent on running all the way to the polls with it.

Okay, so it's really a cynical, selfish response to conservation. But that's no reason not to take advantage of it. However impure the motivations of others, the fact is that we need to take steps to reverse global warming, cut back on pollution, and break our reliance on oil. As long as there are sympathizers around, even if only the kind who follow other trends like sheep, now is the time to start to herd them in our direction. Once a large enough segment of the population gets behind energy conservation and R&D, the politicians will take positive actions, because they will know they have the people's votes behind them.

And hopefully, by the time the peoples' attention switches from "green" back to Survivor Cleveland Heights, we'll be well on the way to making national and global improvements.

07.6.2K6: Who Killed The Electric Car?

Once upon a time, there was an electric car. It was built by a major American automaker, and its original version could go 95 miles on a charge of electricity. Its second generation could go 140 miles on a charge. In fact, it was so successful at what it was designed to do, that the automaker took them all back, refused to allow anyone to buy one for themselves, and scrapped them.

H-whu?

Yes, this incredible story is true, and it is being told right now in the independent film, Who Killed The Electric Car? It's the story of the EV-1, built by General Motors in an attempt to provide legal cover that would prevent attack by government and environmental groups. First designed in the late seventies (yup, I saw it myself), it was a financial loss from the beginning, especially as it was never mass-produced, advertised, or supported beyond a very minimal level. Drivers were forced to lease the EV-1... no one could own one. And when the lease was over, GM took every car back (during a protest, they even denied Jay Leno ownership of one... and he offered $1 mil for it!).

And then GM drove them to a facility in Arizona, where they scrapped each and every one of them.

In 2006.

During the war in Iraq. During a year of $3.00 gas prices. During a year that scientists overwhelmingly agreed that Global Warming isn't just a theory anymore. General Motors scrapped a working, efficient, suitable for the daily use of 90% of the American population, fully electric car.

Who Killed The Electric Car could be the next salvo of the war that America has already brought to the Big Oil industry, but which the American auto industry has only recently felt. GM, Ford and Chrysler have steadfastly fought attempts to improve fuel economy, instead opting for prettying up old technology and staging massive marketing campaigns, selling cosmetically impressive but frighteningly inefficient trucks ("I'm not a truck... I'm an SUV! Says so right on the sticker, there!") for maximum profit. In the meantime, foreign automakers have been proving to Americans that more efficient vehicles are possible, and more desirable. But instead of the American automakers admitting to their laziness and greed, they have simply compounded duplicity on top of smokescreens, bribing the Fed (excuse me: lobbying) to leave them be, fighting to keep their jobs intact and their retirements flush, and denying that there is a problem.

Today, American automakers remind you of the drunk lying in the curb, insisting he doesn't have a drinking problem. They forget that, when one day someone comes along and hustles the drunk out of town, no one protests the loss of the drunk. They are generally glad to see him go.

Okay, so maybe you couldn't convince your Republican friends to go see a movie about global warming. But this one is about all of us getting royally screwed by the automakers, and costing us big bucks whenever we fill up. Cons, lies, and costing us money... that's something even a Republican can understand.

Addendum 7/22: Yesterday, I saw the movie for myself... and it turned out to be much worse than I thought. Worse, because it turns out that GM isn't the only car company culpable for building, taking back, then destroying functional electric cars. Ford, Toyota and Honda also leased cars in California, reclaimed every one of them in lieu of selling them at end of lease, and destroyed each and every one of them. Watching this documentary, and seeing everything we lost to corporate greed, laziness, and irresponsibility, was downright painful.

But even more painful were the dearth of people my age or younger in the theatre. Thanks to a lack of advertising and promotion, everyone was out watching Superman instead. In fact, I realized that I, who get regular e-mail newsletters about alternative energy, conservation, sustainable business, etc, never heard about these events when they were happening!

It's one thing to make such a powerful and important movie. But if the people who are needed to understand the problem and make the changes recommended aren't seeing it, how will change happen?