In spite of the promises by Detroit and the lavish spreads in Popular Mechanics, the flying car I was promised in the July 1957 is really no closer to a reality now than it was then.  Sure, there are some one off solutions, but honestly, who can afford to drive or fly something with the price of gas today?

In the 8 long years since still President Bush has been in the White House, my automobile desires have turned down a different path.  One that makes both good economic sense and good environmental sense.  For the most part, those dreams have centered around the ‘Smart Car’ type of vehicle. 

Small, urban and with great fuel economy, the only detracting factor has been the long distance potential of these vehicles.  In short, there is non long distance potential.  If I owned one of these as my only vehicle and wanted to visit my sister in Portland I would have to consider alternative transportation methods.  Train, bus or maybe even a rental car.  Not the best of choices as far as I’m concerned.

But now, the story is a little different.  Volkswagen AG is announced the forthcoming production of a diesel-electric hybrid that promises almost 70 miles to the gallon.  That was not a typo – 70 miles to the gallon.  Just where do I sign??

Coming Soon from VW: A 69.9 MPG Diesel Hybrid

By Chuck Squatriglia

It’s official – Volkswagen is unveiling a hybrid to challenge the mighty Toyota Prius. And not just any hybrid, but a diesel-electric hybrid it says will deliver 69.9 mpg.

VW’s been experimenting with hybrids of the gasoline-electric variety since the early 1990s, but the Golf hybrid it will unveil next month at the Geneva Motor Show is the first production model the German company’s rolled out. Volkswagen isn’t offering much in the way of details, but the car is expected to have a  parallel hybrid drivetrain with a 2.0 liter engine. Look for it to have an all-electric mode at low speed, start-stop capability, regenerative braking and a 7-speed DSG double-clutch transmission, according to Auto Express and AutoBlog Green.

What’s all the techno-jargon mean? The Golf Hybrid will get almost 70 mph mpg (ed. note: D’oh!) while meeting Europe’s stringent Euro V and America’s Tier 2 Bin 5 emissions standards, making it green enough even for California. The car is said to emit just 89 g/km of CO2. (For comparison, the Prius emits 104 g/km and Honda Civic Hybrid emits 116.)

The hybrid Golf may be just the start.

According to Britain’s Channel 4, VW is considering the hybrid drivetrain in a Jetta and Audi A3. DailyTech says it also could appear in the VW Tiguan and Audi Q5 crossover utility  vehicles.

Auto Express says the Golf hybrid will be offered for sale in Europe by the end of next year. No word yet on when we might see it on this side of the pond. VW hasn’t released a picture of the hybrid, so we’re offering a shot of its diesel Golf Bluemotion.

[Thanks, Wired]

While browsing on the Interwebs today I found this article that discusses 6 technologies that don’t know they are dead.  And the first one I saw, the phonebook, has been a thorn in my side now for so many years I just had to post it.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I used a physical phonebook.  Really, I’m not just being dramatic.  We’ve had broadband Internet for at least 6 years, so it’s been at least that much time.

So, for at least six years I’ve been stumbling over three separate SERIES of phonebooks on my front porch each year.  You’ve got your Dex, your Quest publication and your ‘Real’ Yellow Pages (whatever the heck that means).  So, three times a year I dump the phonebooks into the recycle bin and felt abused for a couple of days.  Abused because of the tree that had to die so that a #13.9 billion dollar industry could stay alive.  What a waste.

Slate has a nice article about the senseless and archaic icons of the 1960’s and ’70’s ‘reach out and touch someone’ campaign.  But right now I’m more interested in the 6 Technologies that just won’t die.

Tech Zombies: 6 Technologies That Don’t Know They’re Dead

By CRACKED Staff, Luke McKinney

#6. Phone Books

An incredible 615 million phone books were printed last year, most of which were used to replace missing legs on sofas or were ripped apart in Youtube videos.

About another million tons of these useless blocks will be shipped out to households and offices next year, where an increasing number will make a U Turn at the front porch and head to the landfill without ever being opened. William Rathke, an anthropologist who studies garbage, says you can "dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake." Rathke, who despite digging through trash for a living has his Ph.D. from Harvard, claims phone books account for about 10-30% of the trash at your local dump.

In an era when you can fit many gigabytes onto a device small enough to be swallowed by a cat and even your local bait shop has a website, phone companies still want us to find phone numbers the same way we did 100 years ago: by dragging out a bulky, ten-pound list printed on dead trees.

Why are they still around?
Since you’ve probably never opened one, you may not realize that phone books are chock full of so many ads that they generated $13.9 billion last year. That sort of makes sense when you realize these ads are being force fed to every single household in America, like giant bricks of spam just appearing on your porch once a year. The only difference is you can click out of a pop up ad. Phone books weigh 10 lbs and have to be disposed of in special ways, to avoid becoming even more than 30% of your local landfill. Yes, it would appear that Satan works in advertising, and he’s damn good at what he does.

But even though it reaches twice as many homes as the Super Bowl, does it get past the doorstep of those homes anymore? Are there really $13.9 billion worth of people using them? Well yes, if you believe the phone companies, and the people they’ve paid to conduct surveys. And in an industry with no sales figures (because nobody asked for the damn things in the first place) how else are you going to track who actually uses them?

Well there is one way. You could go hunting around in landfills to see if the phone books were thrown away all at once right when everyone got them, creating entire layers of phone book in the earth. You know, like a cake? But who’s bat shit crazy enough to do something like that?

[Thanks, Cracked.com]

Brano Meres, an engineer in Slovakia has developed a method of creating mountain bike frames out of bamboo!  This is the coolest thing I have seen in a long time and resonates with the ‘Green Monster’ in me.

Please visit his site for full details, LINK

I know, it’s not always easy to be environmentally conscious. So many things can get in the way. Just trying to keep even with the world we’ve created, let alone get ahead, can take up more time than seems reasonable in many cases.

But there are a few things that even the most harried one of us can do that will make a significant impact on our future environment. And the easiest of these (in my humble opinion) is the CFL or Compact Fluorescent Lamp By simply replacing one incandescent bulb in your home you can save over US$30 in electricity costs over the lamp’s lifetime compared to an incandescent lamp and save 2000 times their own weight in greenhouse gases.

With the current technology you can use a CFL in almost any light fixture in your home. That wasn’t the case even 3 years ago, but as consumers demand the technology the size of the bulb continues to shrink. Brooke and I use these in the basement and other areas where the quality and color of the light doesn’t cause us unnecessary eyestrain when (and where) we read. I feel confident that even this restriction will pass as the technology matures.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co., a West Coast energy provider, recently announced an exciting CFL giveaway as a part of their involvement with the National Energy Awareness Month. PG&E plans on giving away 1,000,000 (one MILLION) CFLs during the month of October as part of a larger campaign to raise awareness of the need to recycle fluorescent lamps. There is an article HERE that describes the program.

I’ve also attached a PDF from the EPA which describes how to recycle a CFL as well as how to clean up the mess if you’ve accidentally broken one. EPA CFL Recycle & Cleanup Document

My favorite on-line retailer sells CFLs on the cheap here -> Amazon CFL Bargain

Today is Blog Action Day. An initiative to bind the blogging community together for one day on one topic. Today thousands of bloggers will post articles that relate to environmental issues in an effort to get people talking about a better future not only for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children.

I had been planning to spend yesterday writing an article or two that I could post during the course of today. But the best laid plans of mice and men…. I woke up yesterday sporting a 101.3 degree fever and basically spent the day lying in bed snoozing and drinking Gatorade (thanks Kel!) so I have nothing prepared.

What I will do today is try to cobble together an article or two that refer to my original ideas for today.

One of my favorite game franchises, SimCity, has added a module which takes into account the effects of carbon dioxide. Building a city and ignoring the issue will lead to elevated levels of greenhouse gasses and your carefully laid out cities will start to die off.

Players can take the path less chosen and build cities ’greener’, thus avoiding the hazards, but the only green choices you get in the game are BP Alternative energy options. Be that as it may, this may be a great primer for our politicians to use to get a grip on how ineffective legislation and poor planning have caused the problem and how this problem might be fixed with stricter legislation.

Although this seems more like a showcase for BP and their low-carbon technologies, this is the first game that I can recall that takes pollution in any form into account.

SimCity adds global warming to the mix
Posted by Cory Doctorow, October 11, 2007 2:40 AM

SimCity Societies — the forthcoming installment in the classic urban simulation franchise — will include a global warming variable. If your SimSocieties aren’t carefully balanced, they’ll swamp their environments with greenhouse gasses and die off. The module is produced with BP, who, I guess, are trying to figure out what a giant oil company does next.

The game does not force players to power their cities any specific way, but allows them to make choices, each of which come with advantages and disadvantages. Similar to real-life, the least expensive and most readily-available buildings in SimCity Societies are also the biggest producers of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that contributes to global warming. Should players choose to build cities dependent on these types of sources for power to conserve their in-game money, their carbon ratings will rise and, at reaching critical levels, the game will issue alerts about the threat of the various natural disasters like droughts, heat waves and others that may strike their cities.

Alternatively, players can strive to create a greener environment and avoid hazards caused by excessive carbon emissions by choosing from a variety of BP Alternative Energy low-carbon power options. Using hydrogen and natural gas plants to wind farms and solar power, SimCity Societies encourages people to learn about some of the causes and consequences of global warming in an engaging, educational and meaningful way. While these power sources maintain nearby property values and keep the cities’ citizens safer from disaster, they also mimic real-life in that they cost players more of their funds, and do not produce as much power as less green options that take up similar space. Informative real-world snippets about power production and conservation will also be available in-game, informing players of global warming issues both virtually and in reality.

[Thanks, BoingBoing]

Rent-A-Goat

I think it was my sister Erin who mentioned to me a couple of years ago that she wanted to start (or maybe just find) a rent-a-goat business. The idea was that since they’ll eat just about anything you could use them for brush clearing, lawn mowing, etc. It appears that someone here in Seattle has beat her to the punch! Check out this Seattle P.I. article:

Rent-a-goats gain foothold

Critters grow popular in city as cheap, chemical-free way to clear vegetation

In 24 hours, the goats reduced a bed of ivy to a mat of bare vines. They riddled the once-imposing blackberry thicket with tunnels.

In less than four days, the invasive plants would be vanquished, allowing sunlight to stream through the vacant lot next to the King County Metro bus depot in Bellevue.

With their four-chambered stomachs and insatiable desire to nibble on anything even resembling a plant, goats have gained credibility as land clearers among Seattle-area government agencies and private developers.

“Getting them to accept it is always the hardest part,” said Craig Madsen, an Eastern Washington rancher who’s part of the urban trend. His rentable herd of 270 Boer and Spanish goats has never been more in demand.

Skeptics, he’s found, quickly become converts. Once the hooves hit the ground, few can question the tenacity of these ruminants to devour unwanted foliage.

[Thanks, Seattle P.I.]