Posted on

The Electric Car Evil

Incoming, via Doug at BJ. So the NYT takes a hit out on Tesla Motor Company, but the Tesla says, “Not so fast:”

Data released by Tesla Motors late Wednesday night directly contradicts a damning review of the automaker’s Model S sedan by The New York Times.

Tesla claims the data, pulled directly from the electric sedan’s on-board computer, proves that New York Times reporter John M. Broder never completely ran out of energy during his extended drive of the Model S, despite his account to the contrary.

Broder’s trip in the Model S began outside of Washington, D.C., ran up to Norwich, Connecticut and then down to Milford, Connecticut over the course of two days. The drive was intended as a way to evaluate Tesla’s newly installed Supercharger stations, which allow Model S owners to top off their batteries for free at solar-powered charging stations lining major thoroughfares along the east and west coasts.

Building batteries is hard; building businesses that purvey renewable transportation options, harder still. I’m not sure who is right in this instance, but conventional wisdom against cars that do not run on legacy energy will be hard to overturn. There’s always an easy story for an editor to assign – show how it doesn’t really work. Not until they appear in a novel where the lads take a cross-country jaunt in an EElectric Buick will the tide even begin to turn. I wonder if horses worked the same media advantages against the Model T.

Posted on

Comin’ Through!

I guess it is video week here on the green site. It’s hilarious they chose to move the Space Shuttle this way. Though I don’t know how else to do it, it sort of has the feel of moving a cow in a hot air balloon. I saw some nice snaps on fB but this time lapse movie is cool – nice pictures, graceful juxtapositions.

Posted on

Lines on the map

Actually, little pairs of lines, close together, with cars on them, all fastened together to move a lot of people from here to there:

The state Senate vote authorizing initial funding for California’s high-speed rail project was hailed by backers Friday as a pivotal step in building the controversial project.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who had made repeated trips and telephone calls to California to push for the project, called the vote a “big win” for the state.

“No economy can grow faster than its transportation network allows,” LaHood said in a statement. “With highways between California cities congested and airspace at a premium, Californians desperately need an alternative.”

It is unclear when construction on the largest infrastructure project in the country can begin. The state still needs a series of regulatory approvals to start the first 130 miles of track in the Central Valley. The plan also faces lawsuits by agriculture interests and potential opposition by major freight railroads.

Passing this funding was really hard to do, and not only because the money will go toward building the route in a very rural area, where not many people are. But the whole point of the line is to connect S.F. and L.A. via high-speed rail, and it’s going to go through some rural areas as these two cities are very far apart. Have a look at a map. But it’s easy to demagogue hsr, as it is health care, as it is education, but these are long-term needs that require attention, commitment – and fortitude to stand up to all the whiners that would prefer to give the money directly to already rich people.

Not to mention all the people who will be working to build this route. People need jobs for the whole thing to work. Come on. Better conservatives, please.

Posted on

Rockets and Science

NASA’s unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977 and now is really getting out there. Via TPM, prepare to have your eggs scrambled.

Posted on

What’s the Question?

bike_lk

Oh, yes: Why are BP’s profits down?

Analysts at banks including UBS, Bank of America and JPMorgan Cazenove now predict BP could unlock as much as $100 billion for investors, either by splitting its upstream exploration and production division from its refining and marketing arm, or selling off its entire US business.

BP’s shares are still trading 28% lower than they were at the time of the Macondo spill in April, despite oil prices soaring to $127 a barrel this year. Shell is up 13% over the same period.

A breakup? Is the writing on the wall that difficult to parse? Investors – I resent that term – may indeed only feel the company has only lost its way. But they are fooling themselves in their larger capacity as citizens grappling with how an oil giant deals with the future of transportation. What happens at those board meetings anyway? Do they really sit and listen to climate change deniers spout off? Really? Electric cars as the connection from the past to what’s next continue to dog the energy dinosaurs [sorry]. It’s powering those which is where the money is and will be, until people can figure how to live closer to work. What happened to Beyond Petroleum? Was it only an excellent marketing strategy?

Posted on

The Modern Transport System

In China.

High-speed trains linking Beijing and Shanghai made their passenger debut Thursday on a $33 billion track China hopes will help ease its overloaded transport system.

…

The fast link, which has been hit by safety concerns and graft, is opening a year ahead of schedule and will be able to carry 80 million passengers a year — double the current capacity on the 1,318-kilometre (820-mile) route.

So we get safety and graft concerns, too, but without the fancy new rail lines to show for it. And sure, destructive for the airline industry, okay, what else? Have you flown recently? The airlines are about as cavalier about comfort, cost and efficiency as is sub-humanly possible. The flight distance between Atlanta and Boston is about 950 miles, and we’re at least twenty years away from China building a high-speed rail route linking the two cities. Probably more.

Posted on

Biking = $$$

So… I’m contemplating getting rid of my parking sticker to become, for the second time, exclusively a walker/biker to work. There are a few different reasons for this, which shall remain obscured for the moment, but all of them are good. But even thinking about it seriously, where you consider a change in behavior and perhaps various alternative uses for a non-trivial yearly sum, you stumble onto all kinds of causation-related affinities for greater Bikedom. If you live in any place even remotely bicycle-friendly, reasons to give up the car are literally all around. And many of them wind up with reserved seats on the green-means-green continuum. To wit:

NBM_IC_ad4_11_0114.indd

More here.

Posted on

Gasoline Monoculture

Could you get to work if gas became unaffordable? To get groceries? Get the kids to school?

What is obvious is that the kind of monocultural economy that we have, based on gasoline, is unsustainable and vulnerable to price increases not to mention availability.

So many of the “controversies” we have in planning really come down to building a land use and transportation paradigm that is resilient, one that is less dependent on external inputs.

Hello? The extraordinarily limited (~1) diversity of options is not something we can suddenly retro-fit to our society in the face of skyrocketing transportation costs. And so we’ll be left to simply not go to school and work, and spend our days trekking from suburban enclaves to the grocery store and back. Well, what? Why not consider it that way? Do you actually have a perception of how far two miles is? Five? We rigidly ignore any possibility that our way o’ life will ever be interrupted. People have internalized the idea that transportation alternatives are some kind of antagonistic socialism meant for depraved urban scum or hippies or the poor (commutative property could be in order here). Now what?

link via.

Posted on

Peephole to the Future

An interesting side point:

Consequently, in the short term the demand for oil isn’t very elastic. That means that if you brought oil up to $200 a barrel by raising taxes you’d generate a bunch of revenue that could be offset with lower income taxes or what have you. But if oil goes up to $200 a barrel because of supply constraints, then that entails a rise in America’s net imports and therefore a drag on GDP. In the long run, I’m sure we can adjust to high oil prices the same as we’d adjust to anything else.

Tangential to his larger point there, but in fact you can imagine a future with $200 a barrel oil that people reconcile themselves to and curse the Saudis or Venezuela or whomever our media mavens signal we should divert our rage – and then people would just find a way to deal. But can you see the same price per barrel brought on voluntarily as a pre-emptive step? Not at all. We could never reconcile ourselves that sort of planning, even in the face of a strict inevitability.

So the thing is, peer into the future through this fence and what do you see? Pain and insult or progress? Because finding a way to cope anyway in the face of $8 -$10/gallon gas is an insult to any kind of hopeful future, low-oil or no. It means we are capable, though not amenable, to changes in habits, lifestyle and consumption. We choose to do nothing until we are forced, then we will anyway?

Nothing limits your choices quite like flaunting them.