GREEN AND MEAN

Life, Rants

I just read an article about hydrid/alternative fuels that actually had me trying to sell my car so that I could buy diesel. It’s about Johnathan Goodwin a “car hacker” who can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental among other feats. He even chose the anti-environmental poster-car, the Hummer H3, for his next conversion project. What’s he doing with it? He dropped in a 60,000 rpm turbine engine to power the generator that’ll  recharge a set of “supercapacitor” batteries that in turn power the electric engine. The result?

A 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!

The real impact to me is that he’s doing this with existing technology. He’s not waiting on parts or technology to be developed. He’s in his garage tinkering, making mistakes, making guesses, but most importantly making progress. This is a quote from the article talking about the Impala that he did for the MTV show “Pimp My Ride”

The show chose a ’65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he’d doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California’s Pomona Raceway. “The Impala blew the Lamborghini away,”

FastCompany article

DAMN!

Solar Decathlon DC 2007

Interests, Life

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Oh Man! I was totally supposed to write about this the other day when it was fresh in my mind. It’s kind of hard to remember to do these things when there’s no encentives. I think I’ll just give a list of things I can remember about the event.

  • Totally cool architecture, even if they all kind of look like shipping containers.
  • How did they keep all the plants alive when shipping them in?
  • I didn’t see anyone from Ecogeek.org, Inhabitat.com, or Treehugger.com, I’m sure they were there somewhere.
  • The international schools are great at Design.
  • Having the electronics covered by a greenwall was an awesome design (puerto rico)
  • The recycled formica outside was really cool.

And now other thoughts…

The real cool thing about the event was just being around regular people that are trying to make an impact on the environment. I’ve been saying to Laurel that environmentalism needs a makeover. Hippies in veggie oil powered VW busses have been saying it for years and it isn’t working, they need a PR makeover. It needs to be cool! If you can get the rich yuppies to buy it then the rest will follow. Why do we want Mercedes and Designer Handbags? Because celebrities and rich people have them and we don’t (also they’re well made and cool looking).

So what’s my great idea really? Envy! That’s right Envy, the new tool of the environmentalist. I’m telling you this is the way to go. If you can get the people in McLean, Virginia to buy $30,000 golden Buddha yard art that also is a rain water collection cistern that will automatically water the yard without  using the public water supply then later when they’re popular you can introduce lower price versions to the general public. I want to make the H3 of environmental systems. I want to trick people into living green.

Later!