ZENN AND THE ANGST OF MOTORING
By
William Thomas
Turning the key in any ignition that ignites a carbon-burning engine is a major moral choice. At least it should be. Every time a nine-pound gallon of gasoline is burned, about 12 pounds of oxygen are sucked from the air and more than 20 pounds of carbon dioxide are spewed back into our space colony's atmosphere.
Every pound matters.
“Greenhouse Gas Levels Grave” the Associated Press reports, quoting an Aussie climate change expert. “We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change, that's what these figures say. It's not next year or next decade, it's now,” Tim Flannery freaks. “I mean, that's beyond the limits of projection, beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in 2001.” [AP Oct 9/07]
Predictions of global warming's “future” impacts are already coming true as a record number of floods, droughts and storms in 2007 amount to a worldwide climate change “mega disaster” for the United Nation's emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes.
So far this year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has issued 13 emergency “flash” appeals - all but one climate-related. More appeals for emergency assistance onboard Spaceship Earth are coming soon as catastrophic floods leave 66 million people homeless or otherwise afflicted in west Africa and across south Asia - while Swaziland and Lesotho declare emergencies after severe drought has reduced harvests there by half.
“The flooding in Africa just now is the worst anyone can remember,” Sir John says, expressing frustration at how little western media attention is being paid to the plight of non-white people in distant lands - never mind an ethnically-cleansed Louisiana. But severe flooding is becoming increasingly common in a warming world, as rapid climate shift also increases the frequency and intensity of storms. With New York City and much of Florida and the Gulf Coast about to disappear beneath the waves, Greenland's slip-sliding glaciers are as close as the car keys in our hand.
“You've got to deal with mitigation of emissions,” Sir Holmes pleads.
[Guardian Oct 5/07]To avert global climate catastrophe, scientists are calling for an immediate 70-8- percent reduction in carbon emissions. Yet, carbon fuel emissions-900 tons each second-continue rising steeply toward an anticipated doubling over the next few decades. If that happens, much of the world's population will be left swimming toward higher, UV-ravaged ground. [ www.earth-policy.org ; Washington Post Apr 26/05]
No wonder a German newsmagazine pictured Green parliamentarian Joschka Fischer holding a gas-pump nozzle to his head, as if he were about to blow out his brains. The good news/bad news is that U.S. reserves of oil will be depleted by 2020, and world resources by 2040. Within 10 short years, any newly pumped U.S. oil will require more energy for extraction than is obtained from the oil itself. [Auto Recycling - Amsterdam]
In his first address to the United Nations, Pope Benedict is expected to deliver a strong warning on climate change, while his unprecedented eco Encyclical calls protecting Earth a “moral” cause for the Catholic Church and its billion-strong following. After offsetting its entire carbon footprint by planting a forest in Hungary and installing solar panels on the roof of St Peter's Basilica, Vatican City has already become the world's first fully carbon-neutral state. [Independent Sept 22/07]
But Dubya still doesn't get it. When the unelected U.S. president met with 16 of America's biggest greenhouse gas emitters last month to reassure them that no new pollution regulations would crimp their profits, the catastrophic sea level rise facing the nation's major coastal cities did not rate a mention. “Instead of decisive political action, we get… next summer another conference,” reported The Guardian's Paul Brown. [Guardian Sept 4/07; AlterNet.org Oct 10/07]
Obviously, we are going to have to act ourselves. And that means keeping the portable carbon burners in our garages and front yards mostly turned off. The Big News, though, is not how tough this is. But how much fun we can have enjoying healthier, more creative and less frenetic modes of transport - while keeping more green in our wallets, and in the world we share…
ENLIGHTENED ZENN
My buddy Rich Vales was on his cell phone from a car lot in California. Even in this state of super cars and custom rides of every fantasy and persuasion, he was turned on by the sexy little car that had drawn him into a Suzuki dealership two blocks from a dying ocean that sparkled in the sunlight.
“Can I start it up?” I heard him ask David Silver.
The manager of Pacific Coast Zenn readily assented. But the silence over the phone eerily continued. Finally, it was broken not by the roar of a carbon-belching engine but by Rich's next comment - now reduced to a silence-amplified whisper approaching awe.
“It's on,” he said.
He'd turned the key on what he thought was a gas engine car and discovered… it wasn't!
Yes, Momma Gaia, there is another way to motorvate! And it's so silent, electric cars and motorbikes may have to activate optional sound-effect tapes of loud burbling exhausts to help their drivers through carbon withdrawals. And warn others out of the way.
“You don't hear it. I freaked out a couple people on bicycles already,” David Silver told Rich after demonstrating the car's loud horn. A beeper sounded when he flipped the car's reverse toggle. (There's no transmission in most electric cars.) “They make it so that you can hear it so that you know that things are actually engaged,” Silver continued.
The car's uncanny sound of silence was enhanced by an airtight cabin. “I hit it with a 90 psi pressure washer, and no water came in,” Silver told me over Rich's phone.
Low speed crashes - the only kind this car is capable of - are more like bumper cars. “It's compressible ABS, you can't really dent the car,” Silver said, slamming the paintwork for emphasis.
“This is a real car,” Rich enthused.
In Europe, this popular chassis with its full aluminum crash cage, and what Rich described as a “massive” trunk, is fitted with a Lombardi mini-diesel engine. On this side of the Atlantic, a factory in Quebec converts these cars to electric power - then re-exports most of their converted Zenn koans to California. (“What is the sound of an electric motor clapping?”) As is all too typical in carbon-challenged bureaucracies, only two provinces in Canada have provisions to license the Zenn.
DRIVE TIME
With a current lead-acid battery range of 35 miles, the jazzy two-seater's speed is restricted by a computer chip to remain within a federally-mandated 25 mph. This is the top speed allowed for “Urban Commuter” cars restricted to secondary roads after GM's earlier, much faster and longer ranging full-size electric car panicked Detroit and the Oil Mafia it has so long served.
[“Who Killed The Electric Car” DVD]
While 25 miles-per-hour will not beat a Boxter to the next light, an electric car or bike is going to shut down just about anything on wheels up to that velocity - without shutting down the planet. And both cars are bound to reach the same destination at almost the same time. It turns out that most cars in North America most often achieve a top speed of 25 mph, while average city car speeds cover just 21 kilometers - or about 15 miles - per hour.
[Auto-Free Times Spring/96]
As peddle-pumping cyclists already know, slowing down confers huge benefits in just about any dimension conjured by quantum theorists, the environmentally conscious, bank managers, and health care professionals. Since embracing ZENN, David Silver had morphed into a much mellower driver. “I'm a lot calmer now. I used to be a major road rager,” he told Rich.
What's the hurry already?
“Eighty-five percent of Americans drive 10 or 15 miles every day - 90 percent of those miles are on secondary roads,” Silver explained, quoting DOT statistics. “Most of the rest can be driven on secondary roads-much faster than gridlock.”
In fact, the Zenn dealer went on, “average out your daily speed doing your average daily driving,” and your drive times on a 10-15 mile commute will be about the same as the typical 4,000 pound car transporting one occupant and collectively consuming 40% of the world's gasoline - a fact that keeps invading U.S. armies on the march into oil-rich regions at a cost of more than a billion dollars a week and as many as two million lives in Iraq and Afghanistan since 1991. And that's before adding the costs in karma (car-ma), and lost good will.
[kows.web.net]
Adhering to European environmental laws, at least 95% of each Zenn can be recycled. Contrast this with the 26 tons of hazardous waste and 422 million cubic metres of air pollution produced for every ton a conventional steel vehicle weighs. Each year, countries awash in toxic groundwater posing significant health hazards straight from the tap must deal with another 200 million scrap tires, 15 million batteries, and 800 million gallons of lubricants. Plus all the paints, antifreeze, solvents, sealants, aerosols, adhesives, sheet metal and oil filters used to service and repair automobiles.
[USA Today Sept 12/91]
Even attempting to mitigate car pollution drains enormous energy from the grid, while ripping up the only planet capable of sustaining life as we know it out to 20,000 light years. Every 12 months, six million tonnes of ore must be refined to produce catalytic converters to control car emissions.
[www.alternatives.com]
STILL UNDERMINING VALUES
And we're not even talking death-trap SUVs. The 5,600-pound, 12-mile-per-gallon Cadillac Escalade, for example, is a crime against the Earth and all her creatures. So too, the blood-drenched Humvee, which sports columnist Jim Caple describes as “The 6,400-pound, 11-mile-per-gallon symbol of a bloated, wasteful and self-centered lifestyle” - American GI's in Baghdad know as deathtrap, and the people under America's “freedom” fire in Iraq see as a four-wheel symbol of death and oppression.
Even if your SUV or Hummer isn't directing .50 caliber bullets through someone's living room, Caple goes on to decry “their exemption from the emission and mileage standards all other cars must meet, the staggering amounts of gas they guzzle, the obscene levels of greenhouse gasses they emit, the stalled traffic they worsen and the appalling accidents, rollovers and deaths they cause.”
[cuffscaple@hotmail.com]
The Zenn covers 3.7 urban miles on about 1/100th of a cent's worth of electricity. The Ford Excursion carries its driver and a passenger over the same distance on a gallon of gasoline - and 20 pounds of C02.
There are currently 22 million SUVs on U.S. roads.
“If we're trying to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, it's illogical to be giving thousands of dollars to people buying Hummers,” said Keith Ashdown, vice-president of policy at the Washington-based Taxpayers for Common Sense. [Guardian July 6/04; CNN Feb 26/03]
Meanwhile, the Zenns and their long-persecuted electric brethren keep whirring along…
Speeding tickets become a distant memory driving a 'lectric car. The only cops you'll be talking to are the troopers who want to check what planet your cool, quiet vehicle's from.
“I'm constantly tailgating people in that car,” Silver said. But even at DC voltages you can't be in too big a hurry. “If you drive this car downtown, you have to budget an extra half an hour” to talk to all the people it attracts,” the zero carbon dealer adds.
FASTER
Still, this is California where the mantra is: “If it moves, it can be modified.”
“You can change out the electric motor. Those come in different sizes, as well,” Silver told Rich. The car can be “souped up” with another chip, and its range significantly increased with lighter, more powerful Lithium Ion batteries.
Currently worth about a grand for an electric battery offering significant speed and range, “LiIon” batteries are about to be “Wal-Marted” into drastic affordability as 17 120,000 square-foot Lithium Ion battery factories come online in China later this year. Offering much more power per ounce, Li-Ion batteries are also half as heavy and much less toxic to recycle than lead-acid batteries.
In a race to the finish with melting icecaps and lifeless oceans, also on the horizon at the end of 2007 are ultra-capacitors that store energy without batteries. Silver told me that range will leap to hundreds of miles with ultra-capacitors that offer nearly instant charging, instead of the current 4-8 hour battery recharge time. The Texas prototype capacitor is exclusive with Zenn, the electric car dealer added. “That's why we went with these guys.”
Rich was back outside, walking around the car. “It's extremely unique looking,” he said into his brain-irradiating cell phone. “Like a Mini-Cooper-but it looks better.”
But even the 50 mpg, $50,000 Mini does not offer the discount Zenn's regenerative braking, which feeds power back to the batteries on braking for stoplights and steep downhill descents.
The basic $13,000 Zenn can be upgraded with full sound system and deluxe glass power windows for another two grand. Sixteen-eight gets you a custom interior, complete with sunroof.
And once you sign on the dotted line, federal tax credit refund you 2 ½% “in real cash,” Silver added.
But hold onto your wallet, Kimosabe - your savings are just starting! For nomads with a three-million year-old mobility imperative seared into our genes, needing no gasoline and no oil - ever! - feels like taking off a pair of enslaving shackles. As one who has made the switch to 'lectric propulsion, my advice is to stop complaining about rising gasoline prices and shout a polite “Fork you!” to the oil barons driving us - and their children - over the Sixth Great Extinction cliff.
“They're about 10% of the maintenance of a gas car,” David Silver interrupted my musings. Insurance costs are so low, EV (Electric Vehicle) owners are cautioned against breaking into hysterical laughter at their bank.
Rich chimed in, “You can plug into any outlet in the universe.”
The great news is that even as Washington dithers to the dictates of the power brokers who write their election checks, states and cities cut off from federal funding to support endless wars are taking command of their destiny. In the Santa Cruz galaxy, downtown parking is free for electric cars like Toyota's discontinued RAV 4 and the Zenn. Plug-in charging is also free at city garages. And PGE's natural gas power plant offers reduced overnight rates for charging while EV driver's count their karmic and dollar savings in their sleep.
The University California has already put in charging stations, and Costco is following suit as the City of Santa Cruz prepares to purchase a fleet of Zenns.
“The car is the biggest thing an individual can do to be green right now,” Silver summarized. “My goal is to not burn fossil fuels again.”
INFERNALLY YOURS
Meanwhile, back in the land of consensual denial the infernal combustion engine continues contributing massively to our extinction through global warming and attrition, killing more than one million people every year, injurings another 50 million persons, and costing each one of us billions of dollars - and soon real North American hunger - in annual crop damage.
This is not hypthetical hype. Each year, India is already losing five billion dollars in crops from car and diesel bus and truck exhaust. By 2030, India will lose 20 percent of its crops through air pollution damage.
And those 1.2 corpses are mangled in road accidents do not count the hundreds of thousands of people stricken by pollution-induced heart attacks and strokes. This year's study in Genome Biology is the first to show how microscopic carbon pollution particles combine with artery clogging cholesterol to inflame blood vessels and cause lethal heart disease. Ironically, with their elevated levels of nitric oxides, particles from fuel-efficient diesel engines are the worst. But car exhaust kills, too.
[www.prb.org
Addicted to the machines its urban sprawl is built around, the United States currently spends more than $300 billion per year to subsidize roads and cars. As a result, pavement now covers over 60,000 square miles of that country - 10 percent of all arable land. An even larger fraction of farmland is being taken away from people to feed biofuel to cars. In American cities, close to half of all urban space goes to accommodate the automobile, leaving more land devoted to cars than to housing. To keep this addiction going, within the next decade, newly pumped U.S. oil will require more energy for extraction than is obtained from the oil itself.
[www.kows.web.net; Worldwatch/88; Auto-Free Times Spring/96]
Still, we remain enslaved to our suicidal four-wheel “freedom”. The typical American family keeps more vehicles in their garage than licensed drivers in the house. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 2003 there were 204 million vehicles in the USA - for 191 million drivers.
[Agence France-Presse July 11/06; AP Aug 29/03]
That's 13 million more cars and vans and trucks ripped out of the Earth than drivers! And that was four years ago. With China hitting the road, and India not far behind in personal vehicle numbers and aspirations, the more than 600 million motor vehicles on the world's roads today are forecast to double over the next 30 years.
[Globe and Mail Apr11/98]
For the love of God, Allah and polar bears, we'd better awaken from our media-induced petroleum-powered trance before then.
'LECTRIC
The first aircraft were hot air balloons powered by electric motors. So were the first powered boats. And cars. As Remy Chevalier points out on his A Confederacy of Dunces website, “Over a hundred years ago, there were more electric cars on the road than any other type of automobile. Upper class ladies loved the new horseless carriage, because it didn't smell of poop! Sadly, heavy batteries, long charge times and Rockefeller's cheap oil sent [electric automobiles] into a century long hibernation.”
Today, Chevalier points out, the international cartels that control energy have billions of dollars invested in an oil infrastructure that yields trillions of dollars in profits - and the control over a world of carbon addicts only pushers know.
Chevalier suspects this might explain why the world's largest electric vehicle trade organization, the Electric Drive Transportation Association, is funded by a coalition of this planet's top auto makers and electric utilities - which excludes the public from its conferences.
Space satellites and ultra silent electric submarines use battery technologies so advanced their widespread use would revolutionize electric transportation, while slashing the carbon emissions that are killing the planet. Remy Chevalier remembers as a child being walked through Dimitri Ribicoff's Florida factory where the mini-subs he was building for the US Navy were able to cruise submerged for 40 hours at speeds up to 40 miles-per-hour using special aluminum batteries of Ribicoff's design.
“This was back in the early 70's!” Chevalier exclaims.
Yet, electric vehicle owners and would-be converts remain shackled to the ball-and-chain of heavy, temperamental lead batteries while relatively cheap to produce, amorphous NiMH cells made by Ovonics and other manufacturers continue to be priced prohibitively.
“The major driver in battery innovation today are laptops and cell phones!” Chevalier points out. “Video graphics quickly deplete batteries, and now that we demand CNN (and porn) streaming into our mobile devices, the mad rush to develop better batteries is on. Yet, strangely enough, we discovered that research labs and institutions licensing state of the art battery protocols also restrict their application, with a specific clause prohibiting the use of these new batteries for propulsion!”
“This is no joke, there really is a concerted effort to keep decent batteries off the market!” writes a blogger quoted by Remy Chevalier. “The energy cartel is well funded. They also have goons who operate globally to break up any progress that enters non-military applications. We should have noticed when Ovonics was bought by oil companies.
“Let's stop living in denial. The problem is obvious. The establishment doesn't want decent batteries until they decide it is appropriate and they have channels to profit and control worldwide. The implications for decent batteries are too universal for them to deal with right now… Over the years, ECD/Ovonics has shown little or no interest in actually producing NiMH automotive battery packs, only limit the ability of others in doing so instead.”
CAR OWNERS IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT?
Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative (CalCars.org), has promoted 99+ MPG plug-in hybrids full-time since 2001. Thanks to the efforts of Kramer and others, the online hybrid car discussion community is shaping the future of the automobile by preventing Toyota and other car makers from scrapping the kind of electric vehicle advances extinguished decades ago by GM.
[“Who Killed The Electric Car” DVD]
“Set fuel efficiency standards at 40 miles per gallon in 10 years (hybrids already get higher mileage now), and you save 2.5 million barrels a day, just what we import now from the Mideast,” writes Truthdig's Molly Ivins.
[Truthdig.com Feb 6/06]
But when four “middle-aged hybrid drivers” staged a two-day LeMans-style race to see how far they could drive a Prius on a single tank of gasoline, they used “pulse and glide” techniques (as described at HybridCars.com by Kip Munro) - and got 110 miles-per-gallon!
Energized RAV4 EV owners and other Electric Vehicle advocates quickly organized DontCrush.com. After lobbying officials for months, they succeeded in getting Toyota to extend leases and allow lease buyouts for their rare and cherished electric compact SUVs.
Record high oil prices are adding momentum to the public's push for Electric Vehicles, which is already seeing half of all car buyers begin their shopping online.
Because the mainstream media watch the Internet closely, Kramer notes, “their broadcast megaphones amplify the stories that bubble up… Now CalCars is exploring the real possibility we can harness all this interest and momentum to incentivize an automaker to build PHEVs (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles).”
[AlterNet Aug 25/05; Check out Kramer's blog at hybridcars.com]
PLUG IN OR PERISH
Google and Pacific Gas & Electric recently demonstrated a half-dozen Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrid vehicles modified to plug into the power grid, as well as recharging from their gasoline motors. “Going electric” allows each plug-in hybrid to range up to 75 miles on a gallon of gas - nearly double the number of miles of a regular hybrid.
A123Systems sells the aftermarket kit to convert the Prius to a plug-in vehicle.
As the New York Times described it, “The six vehicles are used by Google employees near the company's Mountain View headquarters, and sit under a carport with a roof of solar cells.”
Because the cells are connected to the power grid, the energy they produce when the care are not charging is piped back into the grid. Each transaction is tiny, reports the Times - “a few kilowatt-hours at a time, worth a few cents each. But if there were thousands of such vehicles, a utility could store power produced in slack hours until it was needed at peak times… Utilities pay billions a year to power plants to stand by, ready to produce extra power or to provide small quantities of energy to maintain the frequency of the system at precisely 60 cycles a second. Plug-in hybrids could fill those roles, annually earning thousands of dollars” - for each owner.
[New York Times June 19/07]
How cool is that?
On the other throttle hand… with Spaceship Earth foundering and no lifeboats for our grandchildren at hand, even if electrified cars can be made from recycled metals and plastics, are cars a dangerous anachronism that we can no longer afford? Click here.
And please - please! - think twice before turning that carbon ignition key in your hand.
ACCESS
TV commercial: www.travelswithromney.com
www.zenncars.com
www.feelgoodcars.com
“Who Killed The Electric Car” DVD
Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that Will Recharge America