Big 3 Bailout…Not without Offsets

Last blog entry in August!? So much has transpired; Our economy has taken its final slide into the toilet, Congress sent some form of a life raft, the Big 3 are chartering jets to plead for a piece of that raft, we elected a democratic president (Thank you Jesus!) and oil is down to less than $45 a barrel. These are only some of the pieces that are shifting and dislodging our current global market puzzle. I suppose with Ford, Chrysler & General Motors (hmmm...could this be to decreased sales of the notorious GM Hummer during hard times as it's the LEAST economical SUV out there? I wonder...) asking for $14 billion to avoid bankruptcy the time has come to ask, 'Are you worth saving?' Economists are still fighting over whether it would be best to let bankruptcy come to these automakers or save them. Have we all forgotten that you can still run a business after declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy? What’s extra nice about Chapter 11 is that taxpayers don’t pay a dime! Gee, what a thought! The only way they could potentially be worth saving and to make this bailout slightly fair (for I know it will eventually be given as Bush is still in office…) is to calculate the total carbon footprint that the gas guzzling Hummer has created in-so-far on our unstable eco-system and tabulate just how much GM owes the planet and then...drum roll please...deduct it from the bailout! For example; if the Hummer H3 unleashes 12.2 tons of greenhouse gases per year (http://green.msn.com/Green-Living/Is-A-Hamburger-As-Bad-As-A-Hummer/2), and if Hummer’s civilian sales for 2006 & 2007 total 127,510 vehicles (http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2008-02-20-hummers_N.htm) then that means 3,111,244 total tons of Co2 have been released in the last two years alone from this beast of burden. Now if we take these tons and convert to lbs., that gives us 6,969,186,560 lbs. and according to http://www.carbonfund.org/site/pages/land/car_climate_tags, GM’s offset for 2006 & 2007 alone would be $31,605,231.30. Obviously this calculation is not taking into consideration all the Hummers sold since GM acquired the brand in 1992 and started marketing it as a civilian SUV. I’m no mathematician, but I’m sure we can all see that if we were to tabulate GM’s Hummer sales since 1992, there wouldn’t be any taxpayer’s bailout money left after GM paid the planet. Check please.

Gas Problem Solved; let’s go drilling for more!

With oil at $115 a barrel and gas at $4.15 a gallon immediate gratification is on the minds of many, (especially our Pez….oops I mean Prez) and if by immediate you mean a probable 10-15 year wait before a possibility of a somewhat break in gas prices at the pump then offshore drilling is the answer!! Let’s lift the ban on offshore drilling to suck the yolk out of our planet so we can become an even more unstable egg shell, while polluting our skies to do just that. Great idea! Thanks for lifting the executive ban (http://mpinkeyes.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/president-bush-to-lift-executive-ban-on-offshore-drilling/) now let me run over to Congress and give them my two thumbs up. NOT!! The fact that polls show more Americans in favor of drilling in areas off-limits for decades scares me. (http://www.gallup.com/poll/108121/Majority-Americans-Support-Drilling-OffLimits-Areas.aspx) I’m worried about us…I’m worried that we can regress so easily when a little strain is put on our pocketbooks. Drilling for more to satiate our never ending thirst is not the answer…we are only treating the symptoms here and not curing the disease. Can’t we come up with something better? Oh wait… we have! Alternative fuels! Bicycles! Hybrid Technology! Even our own two feet could get us somewhere…but alas, we’re reticent to walk and quick to run into yet another environmental expunging. Every year since 1981 our ‘just say no’ policy on offshore drilling is renewed by congress. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/18/ST2008061801397.html) What about this year?

Are Fuel Options Truly Options?

Pull up to the pump, swipe my debit card, glug, glug, glug, look at my total for 10 gallons and promptly faint. $40 bucks to fill up my hybrid?!? This is insanity, this is more than insanity this is….this is….Hummer pay back!!! The fuel prices are bittersweet for me; my childish side says, “Neener, neener, neener…don’t you wish you were greener?” And my adult side says, “Ouch…there’s got to be a better way for all of us.” But are fuel options truly options?
If you are one of the few that can open your back door to a personal backyard bio-diesel processor and haven’t blown up your house yet trying to make it…you have options. If I wanted B99 I would have to drive 145 miles. Thankfully the bio-diesel retailer map shows more pumps per state than I first thought...so I may be out of luck but Missouri looks like BD heaven! (From biodeiselamerica.org: http://www.biodieselamerica.org/retailers)
For those wanting to opt for plug over pump you’ll be happy to know that just last week there was a conference in Washington, D.C entitled, “Plug in Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington?” (See the agenda at: http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Agenda.aspx?e=1ba5bcee-2991-4be2-b8cb-a994058fc5ce See the transcripts at: http://www.brookings.edu/events/2008/0611_plugin_vehicle.aspx) Dave Vieau, CEO of A123Systems, is telling me that for just over $10,000 I can buy a conversion kit which can turn my Prius into a plug-in electric car and turn my 45+ mpg into 100mpg! This is amazing and thank God I can dip into my retirement savings and live hand to mouth for a few years when I’m 67 because this is worth it! (For the full story check out: http://www.forbesautos.com/news/features/2008/plug-in-electric-vehicles-story.html) I wonder if Dave extends personal loans…
Diving into Hydrogen use I find it’s more befuddling than a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. Some might call Hydrogen over-glorified with all the publicity of zero emissions and Bush’s $2 billion dollar research plan…(check out: http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/hydrogen-cars) I still question…should we put all our alternate fuel eggs ($2 billion worth) into one atom splitting basket? Last for me to discuss is Ethanol which is here and now. (Check out: http://www.e85fuel.com/e85101/questions.php) Currently most of our gas is already 10% ethanol. On the market is E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) I myself would have drive 157 miles to get it…again with the unreachable alternative fuel pump…(Check out: http://www.e85refueling.com/) I would like to be more optimistic, but right now my options feel less like options and more like pipe dreams…

Green Hummer?!

Can the two words even co-exist in the same sentence? If you want to spend about $24,000 on your $60,000 Hummer, than yes…they can. A Hummer can and has been converted into a bio-diesel machine, increasing mileage from 10 MPG to 24 MPG. (check out: http://puregreencars.com/index.php?news=155 ) So it can be done but the question is should it be done? You can drive a VW Golf on bio-diesel and break 50 MPG (check out: http://www.biodieselamerica.org/node/2525) 50 MPG?! That blows a measly 24 MPG out of the water! Or should I say out of the left over grease from yesterdays french fries! Hummer, I’m not sorry to say but Doc Brown would not be proud.

500 Miles & 200 Gallons of Gasoline Later...

So, I've made a move. It's been a rough one and rougher still with my conscience eating at me about using a 24 foot U-Haul that guzzled gas like it was going out of style. Wait, it is going out of style, in fact it's already gone like the parachute pants of the MC Hammer days. I didn't take the time to research what other alternative options I had and if I had I would have found GREAT resources on moving green, from cardboard-less packing boxes (visit http://www.earthfriendlymoving.com/) to a biodiesel truck (visit http://www.gogreenmoving.com/). But now that I'm in this situation, what do I do with the 20 used only once boxes and the 200 gallons of gas on my conscience? Well, I will be praying that some unfortunate fellow who also needs to move will use the boxes. I've listed them on http://www.freecycle.org/, a non-profit 'give-away' site put together to keep stuff out of landfills. As for the 200 gallons of gas...I will be riding my bike for an awfully long time.

A Few Yards and a Touchdown Pass in the Right Direction

When given his choice of Cadillac’s, NFL’s MVP Eli Manning chose the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, saying, “I know it comes out in the summer. I want the first one.” Manning and his Caddy will be driving to the tune of 330 gallons LESS of gasoline per year.(Go to: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/11/09/la-2007-preview-cadillac-escalade-hybrid-all-the-details/ for more details) If one barrel contains 42 gallons of crude oil, then approximately 7.86 barrels of oil will be saved per year by the Escalade. Yes, I would like to see more saved per year, but the very realistic, possibly pessimistic, part of me knows that the human desire for them is oh so real. So at this moment, with the Escalade being the SUV to the stars and anyone looking to blingify their driveway, I’m thankful for the measly 7.86 barrels of crude oil that we don’t have to use.

Confessions of a Prius Owner

I have a terrible confession to make…my best friend has a Chevy Yukon and while I was visiting her I drove it. Yes I drove it and worse yet, I enjoyed it. It had awesome pick up, great turning radius and best of all I was above the traffic. I was looking down instead of looking up. I felt big and bad and I liked it. Does this make me a traitor to my loving Prius? Does this eradicate the need for this blog? Am I a hypocrite? My answer to these questions and please, feel free to disagree with me, is NO. My Prius is still an energy saving beast of a 4-cylinder, my blog is still geared toward the unnecessary, and I am not a hypocrite because Chevy has been proud to announce the Chevy Tahoe & Yukon Hybrid!! The experts are saying that the fuel economy of these hybrid versions is 25 percent better than their conventional equivalent. (go to http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Drives/FirstDrives/articleId=120687 for the full story) Since it’s such a large vehicle and we know that physics tells us it will never get the same gas mileage my Prius gets; do we still feel enviro-friendly satisfaction from owning a Chevy Tahoe or Yukon Hybrid? Will 25% better fuel economy 100% satisfy hybrid loving people like me?

New Hummer Helps Commercial

So, if I’m drowning in a flood of waters caused by a hurricane, I should hope my neighbor or someone I know has a Hummer, because if they do they can rescue me? This new commercial for Hummer is as irrelevant as it is ridiculous. The only thing Hummer helps is the pace in which the Arctic ice caps are melting, and that unlike this commercial, is FACT. This Hummer ploy that courses through the air waves and into our sub-conscience (or so they hope) is that if I, regular civilian Joe Schmoe drive one, I will be elevated to superhero status when natural disaster strikes. Like I said, ridiculous. This commercial should not only upset anti-Hummer activists, but also the wayward consumers that currently own them. If there is a Hummer consumer reading this, please tell me, are you ready to throw me a tow line from your massive beast of an SUV should I be found drowning in your nearest water channel after a storm? Because, after this commercial…I will expect this of you.