Green Options

Listening to NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, there was a segment in which some environmentalists lamented Obama’s new fuel economy standards as being a small drop in the bucket for what needs to be done to solve our climate problems.

While this is true, two comments made by Harvard University Professor, Robert Stavins, during that segment struck me as weird and based in something less than reality — a kind of academic fantasy if you will. At the time, I was driving and the comments slid out of my mind. But last night an old friend from college brought it up again in a Facebook thread and it got me thinking more in depth about it.

Last year the amount of waste that San Francisco sent landfills was the same as it did in 1977 and a mandatory recycling plan for construction sites played a large part.

Oregon, Sonoma County, Tucson, San Diego, Phoenix, and now Seattle. Nissan has been on a media blitz over the last few months adding partners to its growing list of electric vehicle cooperators. In doing so, a clear picture of the company’s “West Coast Plan” has emerged.

New insight into the potential market demand for pure electric cars is forcing Mitsubishi’s President, Osamu Masuko, to accelerate the production timeline for the company’s all electric iMiEV. The company is now targeting 50% more sales by 2011 than originally expected.

In the last weeks, GM has increased the intensity of its internal dialogue and negotiations with the Obama Administration to keep from being killed off. A summary of where GM is as of right now:

Norwegian Finance Minister, Kristin Halvorsen, and her Socialist Left Party have put forth a plan that would disallow the sale of new cars that run solely on gasoline after 2015.

Under the plan new cars such as hybrids, that run partially on gas, would still be allowed to be sold in the country, but any cars that only use gas as their power source would be illegal. Cars already on the road would be unaffected.

On the heels of a Nissan electric car press conference in Portland Monday, yesterday Norwegian electric car manufacturer Th!nk was wooed by Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski and US Senator Ron Wyden as the place to site an electric car manufacturing facility.

With one of Nissan’s senior EV project engineers sitting next to me, it felt like I was being expectantly doted on by a protective parent as I drove Nissan’s EV-02 electric test car around a closed course Monday. Given that the EV-02 is only one of two such cars in the world, the reaction was perhaps understandably warranted.

Earlier in the day Nissan had held a joint press conference with Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski, Portland Mayor Sam Adams, and representatives from Portland General Electric, to further affirm Oregon’s burgeoning relationship with Nissan to be one of the first and premier locations for the company’s late 2010 electric car launch.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom struck hard at The Big Three for killing their electric vehicle programs and lacking the vision to move beyond hybrids.

The EV wars have begun.

[UPDATE: See latest post from Mayor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Sam Adams, and CEO Richard Lowenthal.] Just a few weeks ago San Francisco’s visionary Mayor, Gavin Newsom, wrote a post for us describing his plan to make the Bay Area the electric car capital of the world by aggressively developing the charging infrastructure to support full-scale EV deployment. At the time he proclaimed:

“Electric vehicles have the possibility to transform our economy, revive our car industry, and improve our environment. To make sure electric vehicles succeed this time around we need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in battery technology and [charging] infrastructure.”

Well, San Francisco, you have a challenger.