I'm celebrating Earth Hour ...

by purchasing a mega-watt sucking 150"plasma TV.

http://www.google.co...l/en/earthhour/

I will still achieve carbon "neutrality" by connecting it to my new solar panel.

AND 88% of my power comes from a nuke anyway, so don't sweat it folks.

It's all you carbon polluters who are using electricity supplied by coal fired and gas fired power plants who are really screwing it up for the rest of us. Which is the majority of you by far, since nuke is in the minority, so turn your darn lights off ! between 8 and 9 pm tonight for cris sakes if you care about the planet.

Edited by nimblebear, 29 March 2008 - 01:24 PM.

Tonight I'll turn off all my lights and head to a nearby Irish pub and drink Guinness beer made in Ireland and producing a huge carbon footprint just to get it here.

Seriously, I'm getting excited about the Chevy Volt: LINK

Production of 10,000 aimed at late 2010 at $30-40K, it is a 4 to 5 seater, pure electric car with a top speed of 120 MPH and a 40 mile electric only range but will offer a choice of generators which will give it a 600+ mile range.
A full charge reportedly takes 6.5 hours from a standard North American 120 V, 20 A household outlet.
An even faster charging time is likely when using a standard North American 220 V outlet.

Miles per gallon will be between 60 MPG and 1 Million MPG!

Shocking.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 29 March 2008 - 06:10 PM.

I buy a car that gets 50% more gas mileage than my old car, and in Beijing 1000 new cars hit the road every day.


Even if we could get the invronmental nuts off our backs and build the nukes we need to create a green economy....we would choke on Chinese and Indian pollution.

my friend was telling me last night that he has a ford, built in the late 80s and relatively heay with a lot of stee, and he gets 41 mles to the gallon highway. he doesnt understand why carmakers cant do better than that today, and consistently. and whenever you talk about a plug in electric car reducing pollution, you first have to calculate how much pollution is being produced by the electric plants - not just your local supplier, but all suppliers on your grid. does not apply to those totally off grid, which nimble is not.

Tonight I'll turn off all my lights and head to a nearby Irish pub and drink Guinness beer made in Ireland and producing a huge carbon footprint just to get it here.

Seriously, I'm getting excited about the Chevy Volt: LINK

Production of 10,000 aimed at late 2010 at $30-40K, it is a 4 to 5 seater, pure electric car with a top speed of 120 MPH and a 40 mile electric only range but will offer a choice of generators which will give it a 600+ mile range.
A full charge reportedly takes 6.5 hours from a standard North American 120 V, 20 A household outlet.
An even faster charging time is likely when using a standard North American 220 V outlet.

Miles per gallon will be between 60 MPG and 1 Million MPG!

Shocking.

As can be seen from the picture, a total revamp of the worlds transportation system is in order. They can do all they want with mileage but if they don't design better roads, and traffic patterns, and get rid of these old fashioned intersections, the world will indeed choke on its own car fumes.
I'm surprised no one in the tree hugger or political community has even suggested this. You need NO NEW TECHNOLOGY to do this.
Just someone with a brain and take only 5% of our military budget, and you could drop co2 emissions by 25% or more in a heartbeat. If these boneheads would quit BLAMING and start doing, as in solutions, we could all breathe a lot easier.

PS. I like the VOLT too. Nice concept. GM learned their lessons with prior EV2 and such. They will get this stuff right. Now go build some nuke plants, and get the show on the road.
my 2 investments for the future. Batteries and uranium. and lots of copper.

This tree hugger has suggested: "better roads, and traffic patterns, and get rid of these old fashioned intersections" some time ago here at TT. Anyone who understands the amount of energy consumed just to stop and start an automobile knows the amount of energy wasted at intersections. Locally, one of our most congested streets has had the traffic lights synchronized so that one traveling at the speed limit should not have to stop. It seems to help a bit except at rush hour. But most changes would require extensive infrastructure changes and it ain't gonna happen. Businesses (such as Chevy) could help by offering parking with charging plugs for their employees. Maybe even free, at least initially. There is potential but it will require $4 gasoline to get us moving.

my friend was telling me last night that he has a ford, built in the late 80s and relatively heay with a lot of stee, and he gets 41 mles to the gallon highway. he doesnt understand why carmakers cant do better than that today, and consistently.

and whenever you talk about a plug in electric car reducing pollution, you first have to calculate how much pollution is being produced by the electric plants - not just your local supplier, but all suppliers on your grid. does not apply to those totally off grid, which nimble is not.

Fords of the 80's never got that kind of mileage. The most efficient fuel/emission management systems didn't roll out of Detroit until the early and mid-90s. Ford (and Detroit generally) was still using archaic lean burn carburetors in the mid-80s while most imports were already well along the way to converting their fleets to fuel injection. You can't get 40mpg out of a carburetor (although the urban legend that Detroit and the oil companies have kept a 100mpg carb under wraps has never gone away).

There have been two significant breakthroughs in MPG since MPG first started to matter (after the 1973 oil embargo). First was electronic control where fuel delivery was computerized and optimized. For imports this was the 80's; for Detroit this was the 90's. Everything since then has been incremental and minor gains, achieved mainly through advanced materials resulting in lighter vehicles. The latent energy in a gallon of gas can only move 3000lbs so far down the road; that's just the physics of it.

The next breakthrough has been hybrid electrics which capture kinetic energy -- from breaking, from idling -- and store it in a battery to be used later. That has bumped MPGs up substantially, as much as a 50% improvement, at the cost of much complexity (basically, two powerplants under the hood) and a new set of concerns about toxic by products (batteries are nasty things).

Edited by Mike McCarthy, 30 March 2008 - 04:06 PM.