Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Former CIA Director and advisor to John McCain during the 2008 campaign James Woolsey   bubbles with enthusiasm when speaking of his car: a modified Prius which is a Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) able to run on electricity from his roof-top solar and on gasoline for an equivalent of about 100 miles per gallon.

“We’re paying [...]

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This is part of a series of posts on ‘clean energy jobs’ opportunities for sparking meaningful employment, quickly, in the United States as discussed in Clean Energy Jobs: Stimulate Me.
Clean Energy Jobs Take the PHE-School Bus: $100 million per year for 2,000 jobs
There are
hundreds of thousands of yellow school buses taking America’s children to [...]

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Hybrids are too often thought of simply in terms of personal vehicles.
They are also penetrating the big vehicle market space. Consider the average delivery truck and all its starts/stops. There is a lot of energy to capture there, which is why UPS is pursuing hybrids. And, as per Walmart and its hybrid trucks, they are [...]

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T. Boone Pickens has been spending $millions (actually, $10s of millions) to promote The Pickens’ Plan which, while captivating to many, is a fundamentally flawed concept that could help nail the coffin shut on America’s future rather than, as he promotes, set the stage for something better. There are worthwhile elements in The Plan [...]

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The draft Energize America “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ went out today. Let’s be upfront: it has some GREAT elements and some, well, pretty not great aspects. We are in a very serious situation, but the serious challenge is not just economic, but an intersecting set of challenges and [...]

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Hybrids are too often thought of simply in terms of personal vehicles.
They are also penetrating the big vehicle market space. Consider the average delivery truck and all its starts/stops. There is a lot of energy to capture there, which is why UPS is pursuing hybrids. And, as per Walmart and its hybrid trucks, they are [...]

[Read more →]

After stridently supporting the Wall Street bailout, this morning’s Washington Post’s lead editorial launched a broadside against the bailout plan for the automobile industry. Amid this uneven editorial, which both raises legitimate questions and displays an impressive tone-deafness when contrasted with supporting bailouts for financial ‘tycoons’, is this paragraph:
Congress approved $7,500 tax credits for [...]

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At Netroots Nation, six dedicated people joined to discuss Energizing America: Setting an Agenda for Progress. On this panel were three core members of the Energize America team and three Energy Smart candidates who are part of the effort to change the composition of Congress toward one more knowledgeable and concerned about creating [...]

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Americans United for Change has launched a campaign to Free Our Oil! While an interesting response to the Republican focus on lying to support drilling, I challenged this campaign, stating that this effort supports a quite dangerous framing of the problems and solutions.
If we make this just about gas prices, we are caught into a [...]

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Plug-in-Hybrid-Electric-Vehicles (PHEVs) offer “a path that can unite America,” according to David Sandalow, in his opening talk today to the Google/Brookings Institution two-day conference Plug-In Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington?
Oil prices are at record highs. The overwhelming dependence of our cars and trucks on oil strains family budgets, threatens our national security and [...]

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