The California Air Resources Board (CARB) meets tomorrow. Their plan is to weaken the laws that govern pollution from automobiles. In particular they plan to reduce the number of Zero Emission Vehicles that were originally required by the law popularly known as the Zero Emissions Mandate or ZEV Mandate. In a show of public will we need anyone available from San Francisco to Reno to come to the rally and let CARB know that Zero Emission Vehicles, with out any dictates to which technology will get us them, should be in large numbers on the road. Plug-in hybrids should be encouraged as well as pure electric vehicles that use batteries and if the automakers want to make fuel cell vehicles sooner rather than later in large numbers they are certainly welcome to do so. The point is, we need those vehicles on the road now, so CARB shouldn't be working to limit the numbers of vehicles in the near future. Be there to show your support for clean air that comes from having cleaner cars.

Plug in America Press Conference and Rally

Date: Wednesday - March 26, 2008

Time: 10:30 a.m.

Where: California EPA Building

..........1001 I Street

..........Sacramento, Ca

About three years ago when traveling though the Midwest I happened upon a conversation that struck me very odd. The discussion going on was about the mortgage crisis. The point of the conversation was clear, Midwesterners, the salt of the earth, the no need for government help kinds of people, or as I like to put it, the responsible Americans, were talking about walking away from their home loans and being in essence irresponsible. That conversation didn't compute well in my head so I probed a little. I asked why? Why would these people known for their practicality born out of surviving extreme harsh winters walk away from loans and houses that they had called home? The answer was simple and direct. They were walking away from their homes because they simply couldn't afford the loans that they had taken out. It was either eat or pay everything to the mortgage and eating is kind of vital to life. The stigma of bankruptcy still runs deep in these parts. The pain they felt added creases to their faces that previously weren't there. They were walking away because that was their only choice. I came to the conclusion that something had gone terribly wrong. This disturbed me so much that I tried desperately to put it out of my head.

The following interview was published by Venster, a Shell Oil Co. Dutch-language magazine produced for circulation internally with in the company. The interview is with Shell Oil Company's CEO, Jeroen van der Veer, and was translated into English by Rembrandt Koppelaar, president of ASPO-NL and contributing Editor to the Oil Drum: Europe. I acquired the interview from a Blog post to the European Tribune that had added commentary by Jerome a Paris. For this Blog I am not using Paris' commentary but have removed his and added my own. I have rewritten some of the translation to correct some of the improperly written English. I made sure that none of my changes had any affect on the meaning of the translation.

The purpose of this post is to point out a very disturbing trend in oil pricing. There has been much speculation in the media and in the blog sphere that the price of oil today reflects a shortening of supply directly attributed to peak-oil having been reached. The interview with Jeroen van der Veer indicates something radically different is going on. My speculation is that he is right and that the consequences could be dire if unheeded.

The belief that uniform benefit could be had by pure unregulated capitalistic economies died more than a century ago when people realized that pure market economies failed to produce a benefit to society as a whole. This wasn't a change in thinking from capitalism to socialism as it is often debated now days, but rather a realization that unbridled capitalism exacerbated the conditions that brought about Communism. The great majority of the nation, liberal and conservative, businessman and laborer, came to the same conclusion, that to be in a truly fully capitalist society government played an important role. That role was and is primarily to keep the playing field fair and even so that basic economic principles that benefit mankind can take hold. What had occurred during this time period was that forces gaming the system, chiefly monopolists, took over the open capitalist markets and closed them to the detriment of a great majority of the citizenry.

When people ask me when did I start becoming interested in electric vehicle I honestly tell them I can't remember. Electric vehicles weren't an "aha!" moment in my life where I suddenly realized that I was seeing something revealed for the first time. Electric vehicles and many other forms of capturing and using alternative energy have always been in my psyche. I think it goes back the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970's.

I was a preteen and a teenager during that time, very much interested in cars and driving, as well as being interested in science's ability to solve our everyday problems. One of our neighbors purchased one of Bob Beaumont's tiny Sebring-Vanguard CitiCars and I was enthralled. I never got a chance to look at it up close. I just would see it driving on the street here and there every once and a while. The Apollo space missions were well on their way and on the moon was an electric car. I remember going to GM's Tomorrow Land in Disney World and becoming fascinated by what I saw.

In 1980 Stanford Ovshinsky patented a battery that was supposed to revolutionize the world. A battery that he knew could take almost unlimited charges and discharges, a battery that held far more energy at half the weight of lead acid batteries, a battery whose thermal properties were balanced with metals that combine endothermic and exothermic reactions to prevent thermal runaway, which is an explosive reaction common to the first iterations of lithium-ion batteries. Twenty seven years later those batteries are just beginning to have the impact they promised a quarter of a century ago.

One of the most pervasive views that I have worked hard against is that electric vehicles are small, slow, derivatives of golf carts. Golf carts may be slow, but electric vehicles never have been.

The Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat of Paris, France on his electric vehicle the Jeantaud landspeed.com

I just want to set the record straight. The first speed record ever recorded for an automobile was done on December 18, 1898 in an electric vehicle.

You must have heard the expression put your money where your mouth is? Do you ever wonder what that means? Put your money where your mouth is? It means instead of preaching to people what they should do, live by example. Some people say it means that we pay for the changes we want. So, for all of us who like to sit around and talk about ecology, pollution and climate change how about we try to do something about it. Put our money where our mouths are.