The Car Allowance Rebate System is a US federal program that helps US citizens to purchase a new, more fuel efficient vehicle when trading in a less fuel efficient vehicle.

Thousands of Americans are rushing out and trading in their old cars to receive a $3500 or $4500 discount towards the purchase of select new cars. This may sound great at first but there are many hidden facts the majority of the population may not be aware of.

• The program is designed to get old cars up to 25 years old with under 18 MPG off the road and replace them with brand new cars that have a higher MPG rating.
• Depending on the age of the vehicle you will ether qualify for $3500 or $4500 off of the purchase price of the new car.
• The old car must have been owned, registered, and insured for the past year.
• The dealer is required to disable the old cars engine by draining the oil and replacing with a water and silica solution, permanently destroying the engine.
• The old car must the crushed and the engine and drivetrain cannot be sold for parts, this prevents the sale of the car in the United States and elsewhere as a vehicle.

Many of the cars being turned in as “Clunkers” to this program are still perfectly fine and are being turned in just so the owner can get a new car, but because the car is required to be destroyed hundreds maybe even thousands of cars are being destroyed. But is this really the best way to get people to buy new cars? Why go to the effort to destroy perfectly fine cars that may only be 4-5 years old.

Let’s say all the cars that went to the program that were newer then say 1998 were taken into a low income car program, helping get the “real clunkers” off the road.

It could work as follows:

• The total household income is less then a certain level.
• Each household would qualify for only one vehicle trade.
• The traded vehicle must need more then $500 in repairs to qualify.
• The car must be less then 35 years old, but mileage does not matter.
• The car must be owned for the last year but is not required to be registered or smogged.

This would help get the “real clunkers” and unsafe cars off the road and help clean up the roads. But why was this not the way the Cash for Clunkers program was designed? We can only guess that it has to do with the fact that the Government has recently bailed out both GM and Chrysler. By requiring people to purchase a new vehicle they are protecting there investments.

Another theory about why they don’t want to have a low income program is “Keep Them Stupid and Poor” consperacy that has been floating around the internet. I think the government has been brainwashing the population, there is so many stupid laws and programs right now and the majority of the population appears to be going along with it.

I see this first hand as I am an unemployed, student. Like many others I have been in search of a job for many months, but because of the current economy there has been very little interest. Another major issue is the cut to education budgets, just this summer I had a class I was attending get canceled after the first week was over because they were two people short of the twenty person quota. I feel that as an American I am not getting what I should, if I pay my taxes I should be able to use that money, and I feel it unfair to allow this program to only benefit the people capable of making monthly car payments. What about the rest of the population?

if Obama is elected President, he would funnel needed support to “green” business, such as solar, clean coal, and other companies that will do their best to get us out of our OIl Habit. Maybe a better move for Joe the Plumber would be to reinvent himself, and become “Joe the Solar Guy”. I should think plumbing skills would transfer nicely to such businesses. We don’t need another plumbing business, we DO need something that will help Joe as well as help get America out of the Oil Ditch. With Obama’s plan Joe would likely get the “tax break” everyone is so excited about, AND probably some low-cost federal “start up” funding to boot.

A new paradigm, “thinking outside the box”, is what this country needs, not another plumbing business. I could listen and watch news about “Joe the Solar Guy” until the cows come home.

The big difference from other “hybrid” cars such as the “Prius”, is that propulsion is expected to be from the battery the majority of the time.  The battery can sustain travel for up to 40 miles, more than enough for most drivers daily needs (80% of Americans drive less than 40 miles in a day).  If needed, a gas engine is on-board as well, and by functioning as as a generator (a “GenSet”), it can increase the range for up to another 200 miles.    For the majority of Americans, that would mean eliminating gasoline for ever! 

Bob Lutz, GM’s 76-year-old vice chairman for global product development, and the force behind the project, say’s he’s shooting for a sales price of “$40,000 or less”.

Oh well, you can always wait for the end-of-year sale.

William Yuan, from Portland, Oregon, has a better idea.  A recent science project he developed, entitled “A Highly-Efficient 3-Dimensional Nanotube Solar Cell for Visible and UVLight,” William invented a novel solar panel that enables light absorption from visible toultraviolet light. He designed carbon nanotubes to overcome the barriers of electron movement, doubling the light-electricity conversion efficiency. William also developed a model for solar towers and a computer program to simulate and optimize the tower parameters. His optimized design provides 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than the cutting-edge, three dimensional solar cell.

William probably put this project together using funds from his paper route.  Just think what we could do if Big Oil put even 1% of their profits into alternative energy research!   Rock on William, you are a true American. 

The gigantic solar towers were only “proposed” by Hahn & Hahn and each will be 1.5km tall and 280m wide, and the towers will be welcomed in Africa as at the base of them, people could grow crops. The base will measure about 37-square km and it will work as a greenhouse.

“One of the main reasons why commercial solar chimney power plants have not been built that they have to be very large to be economically viable,” said Theo von Backströmn from Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Well, as in Namibia the sun shines more than 300 days per year, the solar towers seem to be a great solution. The towers will produce energy by sending the heated air from the greenhouse through wind turbines which will also generate electricity. Being shaped like a chimney, funneling the heated air via the wind turbines will not be a problem as the hot air tends to rise.

For the moment, we don’t know when the construction will start or when it’s going to be finished, however, we don’t even know if the Namibian government can raise so much money to build and to maintain the solar updraft towers.

There are an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears in the Arctic, but scientists from the US Geological Survey predict that two thirds of the world’s bears will disappear in the next 50 years because of a decline in the Arctic sea ice.

In a stark warning last year, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre said that the total Arctic ice cover had melted to its lowest level in modern times, and that if melting rates continued the summertime Arctic could be ice-free within 80 years.

Sarah Palin, McCains new VP choice, is suing the Bush Administration over its decision last week to place the animal under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, claiming that climate models predicting the continued loss of sea ice – the main habitat of polar bears – are unreliable.

And we thought Bush was a science Grinch;  Ms. Palin promises to usher in a whole new era of ignorance.  Have a cold?  Just borrow my leeches for a week or so and you’ll be as good as new!

“There’s a real dilemma facing operators of coal powered plants,” said John O’Donnell, Ausra’s Executive Vice President. “The price of coal has exploded recently and it continues to rise rapidly. Long-term coal contracts are coming in at 4 times the price of the last iteration of the contract.”

Australia recently ratified the Kyoto Protocol and will begin trading carbon in about a year. Carbon is likely to trade for $30-$60 per ton, according to John O’Donnell. Ausra’s solar thermal retrofits are cost effective around $30 a ton.

“$30 a ton is $.03 a kilowatt hour [for electricity generated from coal],” said John O’Donnell. “For some of the older coal power plants, you are looking at a 30, 40, or 50% increase in the electricity price [due to coal's carbon output] all at once and an ongoing uncertain future.”

To their credit, Bank of America, Chase, and Citigroup are now considering climate change and carbon emissions among the risks in lending to money for electric power plant projects, so borrowing money for such projects may cost more for power generation options that result in a large carbon footprint.  This provides added incentive for local and federal governments to look towards clean and renewable energy sources.

Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of “smart” charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan – unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go – all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They’d buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity – the minutes. 

There would be plugs in homes, offices, shopping malls. And when customers couldn’t wait to “fill up,” they’d go to battery exchange stations where they would pull into car-wash-like sheds, and in a few minutes, a hydraulic lift would swap the depleted battery with a fresh one. Drivers wouldn’t pay a penny extra: The ERGO would own the battery.

In 2007, Agassi quit his job at SAP. Many of Agassi’s colleagues from SAP joined him. They realized that what Shai was building was still essentially a software company. He needed a network that allowed cars to tell the grid how much charge they were carrying and how much more they required. The system had to know where the car was so it could tell the driver where to go to “fill up.” And it had to electronically negotiate with the local energy utility over when it could and couldn’t take power and how much to pay.

“For the car companies, we made it simple,” he says. “We separated the ownership of the car and the ownership of the battery. See, car companies don’t know how to assess the life of the battery. So they go through these complicated programs of testing them for a long period of time. And we told the car company, you know what? Just like you don’t sell a car with a card that says ‘Here is oil for the life of the car,’ you don’t sell cars with the batteries for the life of the car, because the battery is crude oil.”

Right now Agassi has a lot of venture capital, a company called “Better Place”, and an interest from the leaders of countries all over the world (not the U.S., of course).  It’s a novel and interesting idea.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this one might be the one to make it through the gauntlet.

But so far, no major energy bills have been passed. Is it possible all this money has been spent to maintain the status quo?

Meanwhile, the renewable energy folks haven’t seen a big increase in funding.  Looking at the dollars spent lobbying Congress, that may not be surprising. The renewable industry and their allies in the environmental movement have spent a combined $19 million lobbying Congress this year – half what the oil industry has spent.

If cash equals friendship, then John McCain and the oil industry are best friends.  The Arizona Republican has taken $1.4 million from oil industry employees in the 2007-2008 election cycle, more than any other politician, according to CRP.  That’s over three times as much as Barack Obama, who ranks just below Hillary Clinton as the highest Democrat recipient.

The sad part of this discussion is that people know about, and even EXPECT their to be a corrolation between how much a special interest spends on lobbying and/or making campaign contributions.  You can ID this expectation in the rhetoric behind the report from CNN.  If the trend of “whoever has the most money wins”, then our democracy is doomed.  Progress in the interest of the majority will be slowed to a crawl, if it moves at all.  If our elected officials don’t have the moral strength to resist the implied extortion and “bribes” from these large companies (some do and some don’t, but I believe the majority do not), then we need to remove the temptation by making lobbying illegal, and campaign funds should be funded by, drawn from and distributed equally from our tax dollars.  That way, maybe the real voice of the people can be heard over the thundering din and deep pockets of special interests.

Kennington said he’s waiting for better battery technologies, like nickel-metal-hydride and lithium-ion, to become more affordable. Those batteries can provide more power with less weight for increased range, but currently cost $10,000 to $20,000 per set, compared with about $2,000 for lead acid batteries, he said.

Anyone who has basic mechanical skills can build one of these,” Horsley said. “But it takes time,” he said, about three months. Most of that period was spent waiting for the parts to be shipped.

He’s got the motor of his maroon S-10 pickup set up to run on 20 six-volt batteries, the same kind used in golf carts. The motor connects to an existing manual transmission to propel the truck up to 60 mph.