Eideard

For the second year in a row, Green Car Journal has named a German diesel Green Car of the Year.

The 42-mpg Audi A3 TDI topped a field that included three hybrids and two diesels to take the award presented today at the Los Angeles Auto Show. The judges praised the cars “exceptional fuel economy and low emissions” and hailed it as “stylish” and “fun to drive…”

There’s no shortage of awards and honors doled out in the auto industry, but this one actually means something because all of the cars considered are vehicles you can buy right now. The jury includes greenies like Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, and Jean-Michel Cousteau, president of the Ocean Futures Society. But it also includes certified gearheads like Jay Leno and Carroll Shelby to ensure the candidates are cars you’d enjoy driving…

The finalists included the Honda Insight hybrid, Mercury Milan hybrid, Toyota Prius and Volkswagen Golf TDI. Last year’s winner was the Volkswagen Jetta TDI.

Ah me. I only wish more of the diesels – especially small to medium pickups – built by brands with significant presence in the U.S market were offered here. I’d trade in Ruff Boy in a flash.

BTW – if you haven’t tried it – production diesel cars and trucks run better on biodiesel than they do on the stuff from the Oil Patch Boys.

The United Nations Monday named Disney character Tinker Bell an “Honorary Ambassador of Green” to help raise children’s environmental awareness.

The announcement came just before a screening at U.N. headquarters in New York of the world premiere of the Walt Disney animated film, “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure.”

“We’re delighted Tinker Bell has agreed to be our Honorary Ambassador of Green,” said Kiyo Akasaka, undersecretary-general for communications and public information. “This beloved animated character can help us inspire kids and their parents to nurture nature and do what they can to take care of the environment.”

Tinker Bell rocks!

A pioneering project to make our green vegetables even better for us has been launched by scientists at The University of Nottingham. The research will underpin future technological developments in agriculture that could help fight a looming food security crisis.

‘Greens’ like cabbages and broccoli are a well-known part of a healthy diet but they don’t contain as large an amount of key minerals as they might, according to the lead scientist on the project, Associate Professor of Plant Nutrition, Dr Martin Broadley. He’s secured funding to carry out new research into ‘biofortifying’ cabbages and their relatives (Brassica) to boost dietary intakes of calcium and magnesium…

All of us require 22 essential minerals to live. These minerals can be supplied by a balanced and varied diet. Yet billions of people worldwide consume insufficient minerals, including calcium and magnesium. Since most calcium is stored in bones, calcium-deficient diets can reduce bone strength and increase fracture-risks and osteoporosis. In developing countries, calcium deficiency can also cause rickets. Magnesium deficiency is linked to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and pre-eclampsia in pregnancy.

In the UK, vegetables —excluding potatoes —provide less than one tenth of our calcium and magnesium intakes. It’s thought a relatively modest increase in the concentration of these minerals in green leafy vegetables would have a significant beneficial effect on our health. Dr Broadley says this is likely to be achievable by improving fertilizers and breeding programmes…

Professor Douglas Kell, BBSRC Chief Executive said: “Taking social and economic issues aside, the challenge we face is to produce enough nutrition for a growing global population using limited resources and without significant negative impact to the environment. There are a number of ways to approach this through bioscience research, one of which is to actually aim to increase the nutritional value of the food we are producing. Dr Broadley’s project is a good example of where UK bioscience research is taking on this challenge and his success in enriching essential minerals in cabbages, broccoli, Chinese cabbage and pak choi will be an important step in insuring against a future food security crisis.”

Yum.

I love green leafy veggies, anyway. Making them even healthier for us is OK by me.

Apple is the latest company to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the technology company disagrees with the business group’s climate change policy.

“We would prefer that the chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis,” Catherine Novelli, a vice president of government affairs at Apple, wrote in a letter to the business group.

Novelli wrote that Apple resigned its membership in the business group “effective immediately.”

Last month three big power utilities, Exelon Corp, PG&E Corp and PNM Resources Inc, said they were leaving the chamber over the group’s stance on climate…

Bravo!

A green power building spree is on the way, and much of it will be brought to you by the same people who built the nuclear and coal-fired power plants that keep the lights on now.

What might strike casual observers or radical greens as odd can be explained by good business sense; with few other power plants in the works, big U.S. engineering and construction companies have heartily embraced renewable energy projects…

Moving from solar panel installations on the roofs of the eco-minded to utility-scale projects that will power the homes of thousands requires far more planning expertise and capital, which will play into the hands of the big engineers.

“If you don’t have nine figures of cash on the books, people are more scared off,” said Heiko Ihle, an analyst at Gabelli & Co. “Especially these big projects, where there’s only a handful who can do it in an efficient manner, and you don’t have to worry about them running away with your money…”

Steven Chan, chief strategy officer of Suntech Power Holding Co Ltd, said his company was working with a few as-yet undisclosed engineering contractors, and saw the big players entering the solar business as only a positive trend.

“They can bring to bear a lot of other powerful things that are within their arsenal,” Chan told the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this month, citing their employee numbers, and their purchasing power in driving down costs.

RTFA. You can skip past the sneers of editors who’ve never built anything larger than an origami birdhouse.

Last Lincoln Earthcrusher SUV rolling down the line

An idle 320-acre Ford Motor Co. plant, which during its 52 years of operation assembled 6.6 million Lincoln Continentals, Ford Thunderbirds and other vehicles before halting operations two years ago, is getting reincarnated as a renewable energy equipment manufacturing park.

In a symbolic win for those hoping the U.S. can replace some of its thousands of lost automotive jobs with green ones, three greentech companies on Thursday announced a plan to retrofit a Ford assembly plant in Michigan (the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country) to manufacture equipment for wind and solar projects, and to set up a renewable energy training center. Along with Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, chief executives of Xtreme Power, Clairvoyant Energy and Oerlikon Solar revealed the plan at a ceremony at the Wixom, Mich., facility.

Part of the plan involves a thin-film solar factory that solar developer Clairvoyant Energy expects to build using Oerlikon Solar equipment. The project is the first one that Switzerland-based Oerlikon has announced in the U.S., said Chris O’Brien, head of North American market development for the company. “It’s an important milestone for Oerlikon…and a vote of confidence in the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing,” he said, adding that the company believes the U.S. will become the world’s largest photovoltaic market by 2012…

Another project at the park will be a factory for Kyle, Texas-based Xtreme Power, which makes energy storage and power management systems for large wind and solar projects. The company plans to renovate more than 1 million square feet of the site.

Xtreme and Clairvoyant, which have agreed to buy the plant from Ford, plan to use approximately half of the 4.7 million square feet of building space for their factories and are looking for other green companies to lease the rest. In addition, the plan calls for a renewable energy research and training center for tenants and colleges…

All together, the renewable energy park is expected to create more than 4,000 jobs, according to a press release from Ford. That number includes jobs at the park itself and at area suppliers, but doesn’t include thousands of additional indirect jobs also expected by the groups, according to the release. The Ford plant directly employed approximately 1,000 workers when it closed in 2007, down from more than 5,000 at the height of its productivity.

Building on the ashes of the old. Now, if we could just rid our body politic of ancient ideology, bigotry and ignorance – we might have a fighting chance to discover what it’s like to lead at something positive.

Disclaimer: Yeah, I bought Ford when it was at $4 and change.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

As the whirlwind of Cash for Clunkers draws to a close, it’s coming full circle: The Fed site crashed under the load of dealers signing up – it crashed under dealers getting their final deals into the hopper.

Here are five lessons we see for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, cleaning up the national vehicle fleet and helping boost the market for greener cars.

Green Tint + Stimulus = Fast Pass on Capitol Hill: Help consumers, the environment, an ailing industry, entrepreneurs and the U.S. economy in one fell swoop — that was the basic pitch for cash for clunkers. Add in the fact that legislators were in a hurry to leave for their August vacation, and you have a formula for a very speedy $3 billion trip through Congress.

Some economists have argued that the rebates have condensed vehicle purchases into a narrower time frame, rather than spurring additional sales.

The Crystal Ball straw man means nothing. “Some economists” aren’t worth the paper their degree is printed on.

Bill Clinton updated his famous campaign line, “It’s the economy, stupid,” with a cleantech twist this month at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas. He suggested modeling a set of incentives for electric vehicles after cash for clunkers, saying the high level of participation in the program “proves that Americans will bite if you make it economical enough.”

The Obama administration’s efforts to promote greener cars have so far focused mostly at offsetting the sticker price (through a $7,500 tax credit for plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles, for example.) But that might not be enough to spur a sustainable leap to greener vehicles. For evidence, look to the success of Japan’s more comprehensive approach to boosting hybrids and the results of a new study on Canadian rebates for hybrid buyers. However, making Americans “bite” at plug-in vehicles over the long term might require other regulations affecting vehicle cost, such as fuel prices.

Yup.

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The giant South Korean company Samsung Electronics has said it will invest more than $4 billion to cut emissions from its plants.

It said it hoped that by the year 2013, the greenhouse gas emissions from its manufacturing facilities will be reduced by 50%. It also wants to develop its range of more energy-efficient products, such as new refrigerators and air conditioners.

The company’s green initiative follows the South Korean government’s plan to pursue an environmentally friendly agenda.

South Korea is the world’s tenth biggest producer of greenhouse gases and has vowed to spend $84 billion over the next five years on improving energy efficiency and reducing pollution.

The government is on board. The largest corporations in the land are on board. At a minimum, pollution will be diminished and future generations of Koreans will grow up in a healthier environment.

None of this is rocket science. None of this bankrupted the leaders of their economy. What’s wrong with this picture? Don’t they have an equivalent of the Republican Party?

Sometimes keeping a straight face is the hardest job in the world.

Can we all just lay off and admit that Tom Ridge did one helluva job presenting this alert system to the public. He must have been up all night making the posters. Suppose you had been told to get in front of the cameras and pretend that this thing was supposed to help anybody. You think you could have done better?

The U.S. Homeland Security Department has appointed a task force to conduct a 60-day review of the nation’s color-coded terror-alert system.
The five-color coding system, created after the Sept. 11 attacks, goes from green, signaling a low threat of attack, to red, signaling a severe threat. Since its introduction in March 2002, the level has been changed 16 times but remained most of the time at mid-level yellow (elevated) or orange (high), the statement said.

The threat level has never been lowered to blue (guarded) or green.

Stop laughing. All this stuff kept us safe for eight years!