Jeffrey Leonard writes about The Plug In Revolution in the Washington Monthly. He says:
Electrification as a rallying cry for American energy policy isnâ??t perfect, but in my view itâ??s the best and perhaps only way to get us to a clean and secure energy future.
I think he makes an elegant case for moving away from oil and toward electricity.
Common Ground Magazine talks about One Block Off The Grid (1BOG) in their latest “On Our Radar” column.
Tim Mitchard has very interesting photo essay of the sea forts in the Thames Estuary.
The financial rescue bill (aka the bailout) contains substantial tax credits for plug-in hybrid vehicles sold after 2008. This could mean about $7,500 dollars for a GM Volt, based on the size of its battery.
Here are some links:
Green Car Congress on the senate bill
If you have solar panels on your roof, any plugin hybrid vehicle has the potential of making your investment in solar pay off even sooner.
Update: Here is GM-Volt.com’s announcement of the tax credit
This is just one reason to get solar sooner rather than later: Carbon Is Building Up in Atmosphere Faster Than Predicted (washingtonpost.com)
“The new statistics also underscore the growing contribution to the world’s “carbon budget” from rapidly industrializing countries such as China, India and Brazil. Developing nations have roughly doubled their carbon output in less than two decades and now account for slightly more than half of total emissions, according to the new figures, up from about a third in 1990.”
OK, this is pretty trivial, but I was wondering how much area would be covered by 700 Billion dollar bills if they were all laid next to each other, say in a big rectangle. Let’s play a game of powers-of-ten to get there.
Given that each dollar bill is 2.61″ wide by 6.14″ long, seven of them would be about 112 square inches. That’s about the area of the front of 9×12 song book.
$70 is about 7.8 square feet. A comfortable sofa for three.
$700 is about 78 square feet. I’d say that’s the size of the shadow your car makes, if you drive a subcompact.
$7,000 is about 779 square feet. Some one bedroom apartments in Lancaster are that big. Or small, depending on your tastes.
$70,000 is about 7790 square feet. A house that size might be considered decadent.
$700,000 is about 77,900 square feet. You would need to rent space at the Cancun Center to have enough floor space to lay down that many dollar bills.
$7,000,000 is just about 779,012 square feet. Now you are looking at the Charlotte Arena, and presumably you would need to enlist the help of a few friends to place that many bills.
$70,000,000 is 7,790,125 square feet, or around 180 acres. That’s a good size for a decent vineyard, but the vines probably wouldn’t appreciate being covered by money.
$700,000,000 is quite a bit of money, and would cover about 2.79 square miles. That’s the size of the 23508 Zip Code in Norfolk, VA.
$7,000,000,000 is usually shown as $7B. But it looks much more impressive with all those zeroes. That many dollar bills would cover 27.9 square miles, about the size of Centennial, Colorado. Centennial officially became a city in 2001.
$70,000,000,000 would cover 279 square miles, or the entire city of Memphis, Tennessee.
And finally we get to $700,000,000,000. That’s 2794 square miles. Or slightly less than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.
Looks like the Volt will be getting some interesting competition. The Register is reporting that an electric Mini test vehicle has been spotted driving around Munich, based on reports in Car Magazine. Car says:
“…the miserly mini that will help BMW meet tough new American regulations requiring car makers selling vehicles in California also to offer zero-emission vehicles by 2012.”
Hmm, 4 years away. And I wonder what the price will be.
We’ve signed off on getting a 3.85KWh solar photovoltaic system. Return on investment will be 10-12 years, probably less if we get a plugin-hybrid electric car in 3 or 4 years. The roofers will be here tomorrow to mark the joists, and sometime in the next week or two, the racks will go in.
I’ll be commenting more a bit later about our installer, Real Goods Solar, but so far they have been FABULOUS!
I know that many people will be gathering at watch parties this Friday, but I plan to watch it at home with Twitter. The 140 character format seems to be just right for getting a river of concise, first-blush commentary. I plan to spend this afternoon following a few more people, so that I have a nice variety of tweets to consume.
Hopefully Twitter is up to the task and won’t fail-whale us.
Update 9/26/08: Twitter launches election site tonight. Bravo!
I’m glad to see that Obama is saying No Blank Check!:
“If we grant the Treasury broad authority to address the immediate crisis, we must insist on independent accountability and oversight. Given the breach of trust we have seen and the magnitude of the taxpayer money involved, there can be no blank check.”
It about time that someone stands up and asks for accountablility.