Batteries Not Included Electric Car, (secret) Warehouse 13 really in Canada, China Plantation 1MM ha

Young Man, Big Plan, BIGGER Backers

There is a young man you have probably never heard of before. The young man is one of those remarkable dynamo, "Type A" personalities, and you are going to be hearing a lot from him in the not too distant future. Why? Well, he had an idea, and not very long ago he started telling people about his idea, and they, most of "them" laughed at him or simply ignored him altogether.

I might not have laughed at his idea, or I might have dismissed it, as I am sure many did, as a ridiculous and impossible "pipe dream", although if, at the time, I had known who else he was speaking to I might have reserved judgement because this fellow was talking to world leaders. Industrial leaders, and political leaders, including Presidents and Prime Ministers were among those he contacted, and apparently at least some of them were welcoming him into their offices for a chat. Pretty good for a "young man" at any stage of life, but this guy was no wall flower in the accomplishments department. He was about to take over as head of one of the world's largest software companies, so his track record was considered fairly solid before he went off the rails and charging around with this hair-brained scheme of his. He wanted to make electric cars, or rather, he wanted to "rent" batteries to electric car owners, because he wanted them to buy cars without batteries in them.

If that doesn't sound to you like a wild, reckless business plan to pursue, then I'd like to talk to you about investing in my asteroid mining company. Almost wackier still was that he was expecting that these cars would be made not in small quantities, but in massive numbers, 100,000 the first production year, which was to be 2010 (actually probably the 2011 model year). Now, if that doesn't sound like "mass" scale automobile making to you, let's compare that to the recent announcement of one of the Detroit 3 (no longer the "Big 3") automakers about their latest hybrid car which they plan to produce in a quantity of 30,000 in the first year (and remember that the big fat federal rebate incentives start scaling back after a company sells 60,000 of the hybrids, although that gets phased out over several 6 month periods for the following couple of years). Consider too, that President Obama's campaign pledge was to put 1,000,000 hybrid cars on American highways by 2015. That's not all that many cars considering that Detroit makes and sells about 9 million cars and trucks even in this very "down" year. This fruitcake says he's going to build 10,000,000 cars by 2015 of an all-eletric design, and that is of the kind that has his wackiest of feature, "batteries not included". All the major car makers politely turned him down in his request to build his cars. Actually he says one tried to persuade him to stick with hybrids, and one didn't turn him down. Oddly enough, it turns out the one major car company with real vision, the one with the guts to make the commitment to change the world, was the same company that just bought Chrysler. It was Fiat.

This man was named Shai Agassi. He also says he learned something from Bobby Kennedy Jr., a story about England, some 200 years ago. Bobby told him that there was a debate that raged there about how some people thought it was a "bad idea", even an "immoral" idea where they were getting 25% of their power. They were getting that power from slaves. Some of the people in parliament said, "Let's give it some time to phase this in, maybe we'll free the next generation, but keep the slaves we have," according to Agassi's version of the story. But the parliament were basically moral folks (especially considering that they were all politicians), and they passed the act that put an end to slavery in Britain. So what happened? Did they spiral into a deep economic depression and never recover? Not at all, because within the decade the industrial revolution began, starting primarily in Great Britain, and the whole world was transformed.

(I love a happy ending, don't you?)

In case you would like to see Shai tell all this himself, here's his video from the TED presentation late last year.









Not entirely incidentally, the first "thing" to be automated by the industrial revolution (or at least one of the first things, according to James Burke in his television series CONNECTIONS) was the "block" as in "block and tackle" the heart of a pulley system used, more often than not at the time, to raise and lower the sails of a sailing ship. It was, in a sense, a "military" advancement, since also at that time, England what embroiled in yet another war with France, or Spain, or the Netherlands,(or some combination thereof) and soon to follow was that scrap with the colonists in America, too. As a result, there was an unending demand for more and more fully equipped navy vessels, each with a full rigging of sails. Such dominance of the seas was a major factor in the economic expansion of the British Empire throughout the world. The same could be, should be, true for the transition of the world's economies as we introduce and embrace green energy systems.

SFGate Blogger a Clogger?

He's gay (not big news in San Francisco), he's green (also not exactly an obscure minority in the Bay Area), a former, "fellow and web editor at Mother Jones and communications manager at Rainforest Action Network," but as well intentioned as he is, he seems a little under-informed. He is a concerned writer (for SFGate.com the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle) and citizen after all, and I don't want to be hyper-critical, but he wrote recently about a friend's Mercedes that he says is, "a diesel that's undergone a simple conversion to run on biodiesel." While there is no telling what a local mechanic may have done (or not done and simply billed for anyway), there is NO CONVERSION NEEDED to adapt a 1982 Mercedes diesel wagon to run biodiesel fuel. Indeed, although San Francisco is one of the places it isn't horrendously difficult to find a supply of B99/B100 biodiesel to fuel your car or truck, it is likely that running on biodiesel, is just a matter of filling the tank with one of the "mild" blends of B5 or B20, which anyone South of Montana usually reports behaves exactly like conventional petroleum diesel (with the exception of getting a little "gunky" and thick during extremely cold weather, like you get NORTH of Montana). Generally users of biodiesel caution that you might have to change your fuel filter a little more often, but even that doesn't happen for most diesel owners unless they start trying to run the vehicle on "SVO" or "WVO" which stand for, respectively, "Straight Vegetable Oil" and "Waste Vegetable Oil". As many people know, and I have mentioned perviously, Mr. Diesel invented his engine with the idea that it would burn peanut oil (which was, at the time, a plentiful and cheap export from America). Most mechanics would recommend that you run a "dual fuel" system (involving 2 separate fuel tanks) that starts your engine on petroleum diesel, switches to vegetable oil once it is "warmed up" and running smoothly, and switches back to petroleum diesel for a few seconds (at least) before shutting down, so that the fuel lines will be primed with conventional diesel when you want to start the vehicle next time. This is also when frequent fuel filter checks/changes are strongly advised. Now, I might not have mentioned Mr. Scott Cameron's blog entry at all, except that in the space of a short paragraph, accompanied by a photo of the Mercedes in question, that, "Diesel vehicles also last much longer, so they're a really good investment. And driving with zero [net carbon] emissions? Priceless." All that is true, except that neither running a car on biodiesel, nor even on SVO is entirely without emissions to the point of arriving at "[net zero]" carbon. Why not? Let's look a little closer.

Obviously as pointed out above, running on B5 or B20 is still 95% or 80% petroleum diesel fuel, so that is NOT a way to achieve a "net zero" carbon profile. Unfortunately, neither is even straight vegetable oil fuel a complete non-contributor, because even just the transportation of the fuel, the processing of the vegetables, the harvesting of the vegetables, and all the "cradle to cradle" carbon accounting still won't net out to zero. So Mr. Cameron was defeated before he started on this point about "zero" emissions.

Indeed, the whole carbon accounting concept is essentially stacked against you. The only way to achieve an absolute "net zero" carbon footprint for a trip is not to take it. Bicycle? Nope, gotta count the life expectancy of the rubber in the tires, the metal in the frame, and are those cables covered in plastic? Tut, tut, that will never do. I'm sorry if I am sounding a little cynical at this point. I mean, for instance, that strictly speaking you can't walk to the curb to put out your re-cycling bin to be picked up without having to account for the wear and tear on your shoes compared to their life expectancy and the carbon useage that went into making them and shipping them across the country to the store where you bought them, and even, theoretically infinitely regressing through the shoes you were wearing when you walked to the store to buy the shoes you are wearing now, and the shoes you were wearing when you bought the shoes that you wore when you bought the shoes that you are wearing now, and so on, ad ridiculuum infinitoritus. (Don't bother running to your Latin dictionary to see if I spelled that correctly, I just made it up.)

Expansionist China?

Something that was somewhat coincidental is the fact that my next item was to be about China and biofuels, but between writing the prior paragraph and this one, I happened to watch a (recorded) episode of the Charlie Rose on PBS show in which former Ambassador to Russia Pickering commented that China is getting nervous about the world oil situation as they become more and more dependent on imported oil. Ambassador Pickering stated that his observation is that China is looking for nations where they can play a more important role in the oversight of petroleum resources of the exporting country. What is interesting about that is that the announcement about biofuels that appeared in Xinhau news report almost constitutes a major oil discovery in scope.

A Chinese company known as ZTE Agribusiness has announced that they will be developing ONE MILLION HECTARES of the Democratic Republic of the Congo into an oil palm plantation. Other than emphasizing that the project would create thousands of local jobs there was little more to the announcement. My sources tell me that manpower on an oil palm plantation in a minimally mechanized operation as is likely to be the case in the Democractic Republic of Congo would in all probability take 2 maintenance workers per hectare just to keep the plantation humming along smoothly. A million hectare palm oil plantation would require a fairly substantial processing facility and unless they propose to build a pipeline to the coast or something equally ambitious, there will doubtless be considerable employment in the transportation aspects as well.

Since the Chinese support of the oil industry and the government of Sudan is also a factor in making less effective the other international pressure on Sudan to stop the violence in Darfur. Clearly China is not shy about African countries in which internal conflict and warfare are "problems" as much as we [Western countries] are.

Summer Delights Still Coming

SciFi channel is changing it's "name" to "SyFy" channel. A saving of 20% on keystrokes to "text" to a "frnd" (amounting to one keystroke) is about the only benefit to this ridiculous waste of money attempting to re-brand but I must admit that I've been impressed by one new program and a couple more trailers on the channel look promising. It seems about as "significant" announced plans to change the GM logo background from blue to green. I suggest that they are both massive wastes of money. Ah, but not the new series, at least I sincerely hope not.

Off to a promising start is a series entitled Warehouse 13. The "star" of the show is the title character, which is to say, the Warehouse itself, although having met Saul Rubinek several decades ago when I auditioned for him in Toronto, I tend to think of his character "Artie", the keeper of the mysterious government warehouse as the lead in the show, when clearly the other, handsomer actors are what would traditionally be considered the "stars". Those include two beauties, Joanne Kelly who plays "Mika Bering", and Genelle Williams, who although her character is not really a "lead" role adds a swirl of exotic mystery as the owner of the bed and breakfast where (former) Secret Service agents Bering and "Pete Lattimer" (played by Eddie McClintock) are "temporarily" billeted. Veteran actress C.C.H. Pounder rounds out the cast of the two hour pilot episode which is the only one that has been broadcast so far, but there are at least 11 more episodes "in the can" for this series that is filmed in Toronto yet bears almost none of the "typical" hallmarks of "made-in-Canada" productions.

Happy Thoughts

A hauntingly odd (?) coincidence happened to me on the day following the broadcast of the opening episode of "Warehouse 13". I was watching a documentary on National Geographic channel I believe it was (although it might have been some other network) in which the host of the program was narrating a sequence about Italian art and architecture, when I focused on the portrait hanging on the wall behind him (one of many he was strolling past): I was stunned. It was the exact same painting that had been copied for the Warehouse 13 episode, playing a prominent role that was significant to the plot. It was distinctive because of the elaborate lady's decorative "comb" adorning the hair of the woman in the painting. It was almost "spooky" enough to form a superstition in my mind that perhaps there was some truth to the concept that there really is a Warehouse 13 somewhere that houses mysterious objects which have unusual "powers" about them. Okay, not really, but it was certainly one of those bizarre coincidences like the name of the island country of Micronesia coming up in three separate contexts in the same day. I mean, when was the last time you heard about Micronesia (probably never in most cases).

Happy thought for the day: Micronesia (see, how it came up a second time already, and you'd never heard of it before!) :o) Okay, okay, contrived example, but actually you probably have heard of it, you just didn't know you had. A number of years ago I met a man who arranged for Micronesia to have a "second" major export crop. The first ranked export, as far as I know, is still coconut (and it's "copra", the fibrous castoffs of coconut processing). But the second booming industry in Micronesia you'd never guess because it is "internet domain names". The "Federated States of Micronesia" was designated to have proprietary ownership of the two character top level domain name .FM so that if "frequency modulated" radio broadcasters want a domain name ending in .FM for their online website name, they have to "rent" it from the official representatives of the government of the country (although the actual operations were being conducted out of offices in Los Angeles at the time I learned about it).

My real point here is that when President Obama says he has a "vision" of the future in which "green energy" (and ecology) for Americans' futures, it is not some wacky pipedream. One man changed the "industrial" face and fortunes of a whole country by figuring out how to exploit a "naming convention" on the internet. Green Energy, and especially Green Energy EXPORTS will be the key to economic recovery and to cleaner and happier future, mark my words. It certainly will if my efforts have any effect on it.

Sincerely,

Love and warm wishes to everyone,

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

http://daochienergy.com