Toyota announced the day before yesterday it will soon start production of a hybrid plugin which will get 125 miles per gallon.

Wave buh-bye….

Ford…no plans for a hybrid.

GM…the Volt gets half the Toyota’s mileage. GM quality….hah, yer kidding right.

Chrysler..no plans for a hybrid; just sold a chunk of the company for a fraction of what it was purchased for several years ago.

Yep…dat Ol’ Free Market Solution gonna kick some Murkkkan ass.

And all while Congress diddles around with ‘The Decider’ and his criminal clown posse.

I say this, ‘Impeach Abu G., then impeach ‘Shooter’, then impeach ‘Bubble Boy’.

Convene a regional summit in the M.E. negotiate and end to sectarian violence in Iraq guaranteed by the U.N. and GET THE FUCK OUT!

Our nation faces tremendous problems and we just don’t have time to waste with ‘Shooter’, ‘Scooter’, ‘The Idiot’ the rest of the ReThug Clowns nor…

The Idiot Dems who do not realize you don’t put out a house fire by pissing on it.

You get professional help, you draw up a plan and you execute it. Over the politically dead bodies of the corporatist scum in your own party’s ranks if necessary.

Tell the ‘Democrat’ Party:Time’s Up!

If 30% of US drivers switched to an efficient diesel car, we would eliminate the need to import ALL of the the oil that Saudi Arabia currently ships to us. The economic and political benefits are clear. It’s also clear that the oil companies are the big losers, as are the politicians who are in bed with them. We are being screwed folks, and at the same time we are being forced to add tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. There is simply no excuse.

I know that someone is going to argue that diesel engines are not as clean as gas engines. And that is true. But think about it critically. If you burn half as much fuel, it really doesn’t matter if you burn it and emit 10% more pollution per gallon. You are still way ahead of the game because you are burning so much less fuel. And the technology to create clean burning diesel engines is improving all of the time.

There is a choice, and it’s available now. We must demand that our government make this choice available to us. To allow the status quo to continue is unconscionable.

Yes, society can do things to change perceptions, but that’s an iffy proposition. Americans use 40% of all the gasoline in the world. Seriously; 25% of all oil, but we’re heavily skewed to gas for transportation – less diesel and other fuel. See: http://www.eia.doe.gov.

If you make it hurt (a steep gas tax, as noted above), people will change. Might not be happy, but they will change. For that matter, there are plenty of small 4-cylinder cars that get 35-40mpg today. Go hybrid and you’re talking, 50 mpg. Plug in hybrid ($10K cost adder today) and you’re in the 70-100 mpg range. I’m afraid we’ll have to make it painful, and have national leadership to boot, to get movement on this. That or peak oil (US proven reserves run out in about 2015) or a Middle East war/disruption could do it as well.

Carpenters and farmers? Can do rebates for them. BTW, I grew up on a farm and have occcasionally owned pickups since then. Even today, most farmers I know have two pickups. That big diesel Silverado/F-250 for serious hauling, but also small pickups for the everyday needs. I loved my pickup, but living in the city I only really used its hauling ability 8-10 times a year. There are far too many V-8 F150s that get driven to the suburban office job and maybe haul some mulch or plywood from Home Depot occasionally, haul the trailer/boat on vacation twice a year. Somehow, the rest of the world manages to make do with smaller vehicles. They still manage to take vacations, remodel their homes, and move large items from the store.

The Senate is voting on the cloture motion to proceed to their energy bill late Monday [the Senate shut down for the weekend Thursday evening after suspending until further notice the latest three-day “debate” on the Immigration Bill; that’s two weeks in a row without further movement or even rhetoric in the Senate toward ending our occupation of Iraq, following the Congressional capitulation vote that gave Bush a free hand with our money and the lives of our Armed Forces and the Iraqi people whose nation we occupy].

Some members of the British Army recognize empire-building in pursuit of Black Gold when they see it, while the media deliberately turns its head, as John Pilger points out well:

What is also different is the growing awareness in the British forces and the public of how “the official line” is played through the media.

[snip]

More often than not, censorship by omission is employed: for example, by omitting the fact that almost 80 per cent of attacks are directed against the occupation forces (source: the Pentagon) so as to give the impression that the occupiers are doing their best to separate “warring tribes” and are crisis managers rather than the cause of the crisis.

There is a last-ditch sense about this kind of propaganda. Seymour Hersh said recently, “[In April, the Bush administration] made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, they would go back to the al-Qaeda card, although there’s no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple of per cent and they’re sort of leaderless… there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant co-ordination of these groups, but the press keeps going ga-ga about al-Qaeda… it’s just amazing to me.”

http://www.countercurrents.org/pilger080607.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/new…..email.html

http://medialens.org/

Tom Engelhardt also has a very sobering and comprehensive new article about the construction of our permanent future points of “access” in Iraq: giant city-state bases that Congress has steadily funded and our media has steadily ignored:

The problem was that, thanks largely to terrible media coverage, the American people knew little or nothing about those developing facts-on-the-ground and that disconnect has made all the difference for years.

[snip]

From 2003 to the present, the work building, maintaining, and continually upgrading these bases (and their equivalents in Afghanistan) has never ended. Though the huge base-building contracts were given out long ago, consider just a couple of modest contracts of recent vintage.

[snip]

These, then, were the Bush administration’s facts-on-the-Iraqi-ground. Whatever anyone was saying at any moment about ending the American presence in Iraq someday or turning “sovereignty” over to the Iraqis, for American reporters in Baghdad, as well as the media at home, the “enduring” nature of what was being built should have been unmistakable — and it should have counted for something.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/pos…..ose_bases_

Instead put money into university and corporate research & competition to produce the next generation high efficiency, low cost low pollutant vehicles.

These engineering competitions are being done for robot controlled vehicles and for other things — why not for fuel efficiency and cost/mile efficiency?

There was an award for the first civilian space craft and it spurred an honest race.

Let’s have a competition to develop some better vehicles!

They could make an SUV that got 100 MPG, but that would require their CEOs and other top officers to slash their perks and profit-takings by 90%. And they would much rather maintain their perks than preserve their companies — after all, THEIR platinum parachutes are safe.

Carter & Co saved Chrysler, but should any Dem administration save a major auto company if they refuse to do the patriotic thing and build more fuel-efficient cars to help keep us from having to go to war all the time?

It’s simple really. They can build better more fuel efficient cars and it would buy them better protection during bad weather. No improvements and they get rained on.

It is, after all, a national security issue as we are reminded daily.

The Moral Equivalent of War

do they not understand?

zhiv — in between her occasional Saturday morning garden posts, CHS writes awesome coverage of constitutional/rule of law/surveillance issues, posts on the Justice Department, immigration, health care, mining regulations, executive accountability, congressional corruption, etc, etc, etc. Check out the list of topics on the far right.

Scarecrow–
Just to EPU for the record, I’d say I read 98% of the words CHS writes on FDL and I’m in awe of her. She’s not just amazing, but she and JH and others like yourself are doing really important work. I was rushed this morning and knew there was something wrong about that sentence as I was writing it, a vague idea in the back of my head that it could be taken in the wrong way, like she only did posts on gardens and birds and books. I was referring to the relaxing weekend morning cuppa posts that I very much enjoy, and thought that how we all get around might be a good topic. My bad, and believe me, no one has to tell me that CHS kicks ass.

Supply and demand.

If one company doesn’t build enough SUVs, people will spend money on the car manufacturers who do.

So, if one company decides to scrap their SUV divisions, then they lose out. And their competition gains from new consumers.

It requires a widespread industry decision. And this shouldn’t be imposed by the gov’t. It has to come from the consumers end to say ‘we dont need any more of these SUVs’..

..So, to kill SUV production, it’s up to the Collective Us. Laws / regulations will just piss people off.

These are arguments for mandatory standards, because there is an “externality” at work that biases the market outcome. Think of energy-efficient homes, with lots of insulation, insulated glazing, etc — these features costs money. Home builders competing mostly on higher quality might do these things and advertise that fact; but builders reaching for the entry-level market (first time buyers) will want to compete on costs and have an incentive to skimp on features that add up front costs, even though they pay for themselves in lifetime energy savings. Without the improvements, these homes cost everyone through increased costs for electricity and gas facilities, etc, not to mention Middle East wars.

This logic drove California to adopt mandatory standards for every new home and office building — everyone faces the extra costs, and the entire fleet of homes/offices becomes more energy efficient — thus cutting costs in the long run for everyone.

Analogous arguments apply to the need for mandatory efficiency standards for autos.