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The Right Car for the Right Time?

The Fisker Karma

This one is blue, but it’s actually green, and it’s a Fisker.

Never heard of it? Neither had I, until I was stumbling through another confusing day on the Internet. Sounds like someone remembered how to build, market, and sell to the American people:

Fisker Automotive plans to fire up its production line in May and have the first Karma plug-in hybrids in showrooms by September.

Founder Henrik Fiskerrevealed the production version of his superluxe car here at the Los Angeles Auto Show and said the first customers will be driving them by this time next year. Some 1,500 people have placed orders for the $87,900 Karma plug-in hybrid, which will be built in Finlandby Valmet Automotive. Fisker said he wants to have as many in driveways as possible by the end of 2010, but some who have already placed deposits may have to wait until 2011.

“The line at Valmet starts in May,” he said. “We’ll see how fast we can ramp up production. What I can say is if you haven’t placed an order by now, you won’t see a car until 2011.”

Fisker Karma Interior (experience tells me this would be an excellent car to use while Ghost Riding the Whip)

Fisker says the company is currently crash testing cars on its own. Federal crash testing will begin once the production line starts. And though he’s still got a lot of work to do if the company is to hit its goal for the Karma, Fisker is already looking ahead to several new models.

Fisker says project engineering for Project Nina, his mid-sized plug-in hybrid sedan, will begin in January now that the Department of Energy has approved a $528.7 million loan to help get the car built.

“The DOE loan means we’re stepping in the accelerator yet again,” Fisker said.

Nina will be built entirely in the United States at a former General Motors plant in Wilmington, Delaware, that Fisker Automotive bought in October. The company will spend $175 million refurbishing the plant to build the car. Nina is slated to cost $39,900 after the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs and plug-in hybrids. Fisker says Nina will see production in mid-2012 but we won’t see what it looks like for another year or so.

I’m all for giving them a loan, provided there’s a viable business model there in order to get the money back, with a slight bit of interest added on, of course. Just the fact that there are plans to build them here in this country, fine and dandy with that as well. Now, given that no one has any money, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs, and treading water with an overabundance of cars flooding the American market, you have to admire the chutzpah in starting a car company. The only people who will be able to afford these cars are whoever just won American Idol and government contractors and neither are a reliable economic indicator.

Would I buy one? Sure. This thing looks amazing. I’d want to drive one, but yes. I think I would buy one.

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Twice the Size of Texas

Fish inside of a caulking tube

If you have spent time on the water in the blue water part of the oceans on this Earth, you'll know what I'm talking about when I speak of debris. I have never seen what is described here, but it sounds awful:

In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.

Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.

Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.

Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.

These giant whirlpools are where the garbage itself becomes encrusted with organisms and turned into floating carriers. As the organisms grow and multiply, their weight sinks the debris slowly, causing it to go down far enough to kill what it is on it and shed what is on it and then pop back up to the surface to do it all over again:

There are researchers trying to do comparative analysis of this problem:

Charles Moore found the Pacific garbage patch by accident 12 years ago, when he came upon it on his way back from a sailing race in Hawaii. As captain, Mr. Moore ferried three researchers, his first mate and a journalist here this summer in his 10th scientific trip to the site. He is convinced that several similar garbage patches remain to be discovered.

“Anywhere you really look for it, you’re going to see it,” he said.

Many scientists believe there is a garbage patch off the coast of Japan and another in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Bonnie Monteleone, a University of North Carolina, Wilmington, graduate student researching a master’s thesis on plastic accumulation in the ocean, visited the Sargasso Sea in late spring and the Pacific garbage patch with Mr. Moore this summer.

“I saw much higher concentrations of trash in the Pacific garbage patch than in the Sargasso,” Ms. Monteleone said, while acknowledging that she might not have found the Atlantic gyre.

Ms. Monteleone, a volunteer crew member on Mr. Moore’s ship, kept hoping she would see at least one sample taken from the Pacific garbage patch without any trash in it. “Just one area — just one,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to see. But everywhere had plastic.”

Yes, it is everywhere. It sounds like the Pacific Ocean truly has a problem with this trash. Finding a way to clean it up and turn the plastic into something that can be safely disposed of is a problem we could try to solve with better technology. An organization called Project Kaisei, cited in the article, is looking for a viable way to study this debris and use the material positively and wisely.

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Just Because Australians Are Drunk a Lot Doesn't Mean They Can't Drill Offshore for Oil

Oil Rig Fire, Timor Sea

In case you haven't heard, there's an oil rig on fire in the Timor Sea:

An oil spill disaster that could rival the impact of the Exxon Valdez is playing out tonight off the coast of Australia. For 10 weeks, a crippled deep-water oil rig has been leaking millions of gallons into the ocean between Australia's northwest coast and the islands of Indonesia.

It is bringing to light the possible environmental impact when offshore drilling goes wrong, as CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports.

With explosive gas spewing into the air and thousands of gallons of oil pouring into the water each day the spill began claiming sea snakes, birds and dolphins.

The blowout is thought to have been caused by a fracture in a pipe 8,000 feet beneath the sea floor. Again and again over two months the Thailand-based company that owns the rig tried and failed to plug the well.

"We remain committed and resolved to achieve our goal," said Jose Martins, chief financial officer of the company, Pttep Oil. "That may require a few more attempts."

Just how much has spilled is uncertain. Environmental groups say satellite photos show its spread across more than 9,000 square miles and estimate some 9 million gallons have poured into the ocean - nearly as much as the 11 million gallons that escaped from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.

While there may be some use of this symbolic image to try to slow down offshore drilling, you have to remember that the defenders of offshore drilling are going to attack this issue in several different ways. First, they may point out that the state of the art technology used by the oil rig is different from the state of the art technology we might be using off the coast of Florida or Texas. Second, they may point to it as an isolated incident, blown up out of proportion to how safe and reliable offshore drilling really is. Third, there is always the fact that oil and natural gas has always leaked into the ocean naturally, through deep fissures in the ocean floor. Even though I'm not a geologist, and I have never had occasion to pretend to be one to get a government loan, I do know that you can certainly fudge the amount of oil that it is possible to extract from a site. That might be another argument against banning or slowing down the expansion of offshore drilling.

Then there is an entirely different angle that I am afraid they might use, and that's the angle nearly everyone uses to attack anything Australian, and that's the "drunk Aussie" angle. This is so wrong, I hesitate to bring it up. The image of smash-drunk Aussies, dancing around a neglected bonfire, shooting guns and throwing fat girls into the ocean springs to mind.

Let's be brutally honest--the Australians are a bunch of drunken louts. They're not as bad as the Russians, but, bear in mind, a lot of Russians emigrate to Australian because their livers can't take the vodka anymore, and they move on to that weak Australian beer they serve down there. There's a term for this type of individual by the way, and it's "yabbo." When you think of a drunken Australian, dropping his freshly-trimmed short pants and howling into a rolled up sheet of aluminum like it is a ten dollar megaphone, think of the hateful implications of assuming that a rollicking yabbo party on the main deck of the oil rig, complete with Radio Birdman songs and sex dolls cavorting with wallabies, caused this disaster. Don't give in to the hate. Incompetence is a disease, and, brother, that disease has taken hold in Australia.

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The Bat Massacre of West Virginia

   Dutch Windmills: Bat Killers? You Decide

Environmentalism and green energy technology--a collision best described as interesting:

Workers atop mountain ridges are putting together 389-foot windmills with massive blades that will turn Appalachian breezes into energy. Retiree David Cowan is fighting to stop them.

Because of the bats.

Cowan, 72, a longtime caving fanatic who grew to love bats as he slithered through tunnels from Maine to Maui, is asking a federal judge in Maryland to halt construction of the Beech Ridge wind farm. The lawsuit pits Chicago-based Invenergy, a company that produces "green" energy, against environmentalists who say the cost to nature is too great.

The rare green vs. green case went to trial Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt.

It is the first court challenge to wind power under the Endangered Species Act, lawyers on both sides say. With President Obama's goal of doubling renewable energy production by 2012, wind and solar farms are expanding rapidly. That has sparked battles to reach a balance between the benefits of clean energy and the impact on birds, bats and even the water supply.

At the heart of the Beech Ridge case is the Indiana bat, a brownish-gray creature that weighs about as much as three pennies and, wings outstretched, measures about eight inches. A 2005 estimate concluded that there were 457,000 of them, half the number in 1967, when they were first listed as endangered.

"Any kind of energy development is going to have environmental impacts that are going to concern somebody," said John D. Echeverria, a Vermont Law School professor who specializes in environmental law and isn't involved in the suit. "This has been an issue for the environmental community. They are enthusiastic; at the same time, they realize there are these adverse impacts."

We should find a way to switch to green technology without endangering a species--that's why Poindexter runs around with his pith helmet and his clipboard, trying to record the sounds of bats making sweet love in the air while they fly through the churning rotors of a working windmill. You cannot escape the conclusion that, if we don't switch to green technology, virtually all species are threatened with something worse than turbine blades, however. This is where you put aside your bias and try to reach a compromise.

The Endandered Species Act brings out a lot of controversy, however, and environmentalist vs environmentalist is nothing new. The first place to start is to try to find good statistics and see what the problem is:

To most experts, though, there's a problem with the bird-mortality argument: The vast majority of research shows that wind turbines kill relatively few birds, at least compared with other man-made structures. The statistics are shocking if you consider just how many people are crying out against wind power for the birds' sake:

Man-made structure/technology	Associated bird deaths per year (U.S.)
Feral and domestic cats	Hundreds of millions [source: AWEA]
Power lines	130 million -- 174 million [source: AWEA]
Windows (residential and commercial)	100 million -- 1 billion [source: TreeHugger]
Pesticides	70 million [source: AWEA]
Automobiles	60 million -- 80 million [source: AWEA]
Lighted communication towers	40 million -- 50 million [source: AWEA]
Wind turbines	10,000 -- 40,000 [source: ABC]

­

­Collisions with wind turbines account for about one-tenth of a percent of all "unnatural" bird deaths in the United States each year. And of all bird deaths, 30 percent are due to natural causes, like baby birds falling from nests [source: AWEA]. So why the widespread misconception that labels wind turbines "bird-o-matics"? I­t all starts with California, raptors and the thousands of old turbines that make up the Altamont Pass wind farm.

Fair enough, I guess. Methodology being what it is, I wouldn't just accept these numbers because I really question the accuracy--as in, how do you really know? There are multiple sources listed above--do they all use the same methodology? Does the AWEA reallycount how many baby birds fall out of nests? Why do I suspect that ABC's citation of 10,000-40,000 deaths from wind turbines is based on a different methodology than that of the other two organizations? That data seems to come from an assessment done several years ago to figure out what impact the aforementioned Altamont Pass site was having on birds of prey:

After years of study but little progress reducing bird kills, environmentalists have sued to force turbine owners to take tough corrective measures. The companies, at risk of federal prosecution, say they see the need to protect birds. "Once we finally realized that this issue was really serious, that we had to solve it to move forward, we got religion," says George Hardie, president of G3 Energy.

The size of the annual body count — conservatively put at 4,700 birds — is unique to this sprawling, 50-square-mile site in the Diablo Mountains between San Francisco and the agricultural Central Valley because it spans an international migratory bird route regulated by the federal government. The low mountains are home to the world's highest density of nesting golden eagles.

Scientists don't know whether the kills reduce overall bird populations but worry that turbines, added to other factors, could tip a species into decline. "They didn't realize it at the time, but it was just a really bad place to build a wind farm," says Grainger Hunt, an ecologist with the Peregrine Fund who has studied eagles at Altamont.

Across the USA — from Cape Cod to the Southern California desert — new wind projects, touted as emission-free options to oil- and gas-fueled power plants, face resistance over wildlife, noise and vistas. The clashes come as wind-energy demand is growing, in part because 17 states have passed laws requiring that some of their future energy — 20% in California by 2010 — come from renewable sources.

Environmental groups, fans in principle of "green" power, are caught in the middle. "We've been really clear all along, we absolutely support wind energy as long as facilities are appropriately sited," says Jeff Miller, Bay Area wildlands coordinator for the Center for Biological Diversity, which took 12 companies to court.

Let's say that they're in the ballpark then, and that the actual number rests between 7,000 and 70,000. Is that still enough to justify denying someone a permit to operate a wind farm? In order to establish a wind farm, you have to find a geographic location suitable to it. I would add that you had better have a handle on migratory routes as well--and these routes probably follow the wind as well.

There is a site where this data is housed, and it is called, appropriately, towerkill.com. I don't think anyone who wants to put up a communications tower or a wind turbine should ignore efforts to determine whether or not that particular site is damaging an endangered species. It's all about balancing different needs and different threats, and if we can't figure out how to make that work, we're all going to die, boiled in our own juices and forced to leave this planet. I plan to be buried here--do I want my children to have to get on a spaceship and leave me here? As the kids say, hells no.

I got you right here, homeys, yes.

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