Still No Jetpacks Though...

At the 2009 Detroit Auto Show, GM announced the pending construction of a new manufacturing facility for production of lithium-in battery packages, for the now showcased Chevy Volt. There is a cooperative Korean partner in the venture.

I feel like church bells should be ringing. The future has arrived. The GM announcement tolls in a new era, while declaring the end of the "Whatever Happened to the Electric Car?" narrative.

To get there, the indigenous Big Three executives were forced to face the firing squad that was the Congressional bail-out hearings. After realizing that Congress was serious about selling the Lear jets, some of the old guard might have preferred blind-folds and one last Cuesta-Rey.

But let it pass...they're changed men now. And this battery factory announcement does indeed point a path to a healthier future. Government juice will be needed, with tax code benefits for producers and consumers, but those will soon be forth-coming. The electric car and a grid to support it is in the works. Thirty years too late? No; better late than never, and time to make up for lost ground.

"Perfect Storm" was on this year's "please! Enough already!" list, but this is one. One in which the American technology advantage, meets the need for a source of new jobs, to replace the lost American manufacturing base, and an intelligent national leader with a mandate and a checkbook. And a Congress eager to redeem itself. It is all good, and flashing green. (all except that nagging debt/deficit worry...but Paul Krugman says never mind, so never mind. But I'm just saying,,,)

That aside, a manufacturing boom in electric cars could come soon, is likely to take off quickly in the new economic environment, and promises to become a foundation stone of a new economy.

In terms of consumer acceptance, not to worry. Consumers love innovation, and American stylists have not lost their touch; I hope the Volt on the street looks like it looks like now (that was fun), but I doubt it. The suits are too stiff.

American piston-heads will adapt quickly, when they realize that electric cars can be made to go fast - very fast... If you wish, very, very fast. What consumers will not tolerate is a vehicle that drains its batteries and comes rolling to a dead stop forty miles down the road. The Tesla, a high-end, low production electric sports car manufactured in California, has overcome this problem by increasing the number of li-on batteries, leading to a travel range of about 250 miles, which would be plenty. The market price for a new Tesla is $200K+ the high cost mainly being a function of the battery cost. It's not for the guy currently driving down the Interstate in a Camry. So large-scale manufacturing of batteries for the U.S. automobile industry, with attendant drop in unit price through economies of scale, is an opportunity to establish both a new market and a new economy.

But radical change requires men of experience and courage. Men with hard eyes. Not the herd of sheep that testified before Congress last month. Memo to Obama Team: Innovation needed in brain-pans of the auto industry executive class, before the future can really get underway.

Header image by DHLarsen - Chagrin Reservation; January, 2006 - 17 x 30




Lakeview Cemetery; Cleveland, Ohio - Plutocrats enjoying the winter sun - January, 2004 - 17 x 21




And in a Related Story...





For over forty years a small but, thankfully, growing number of well-informed and thoughtful people have known that dependence on fossil fuels was causing serious long-term damage to the global environment, and that it would soon be necessary to shift away from carbon-based energy, and toward renewable resources. Millions in the world have been working toward this goal. But in terms of the responsiveness of major institutional decision-makers, pressure for change has met with persistent and sometimes virulent resistance.

Not to mention effective. In today's economy, petroleum and coal remain the fuels on which all of the world depends, with renewables playing only a minor role, despite the consequences for clean air and water, and the contribution made to increasing levels of CO2 content in the world's atmosphere and oceans. The result, not of public indifference, but of a decades long campaign of manipulation and disinformation by the decision-makers within the institutions that profit from carbon, and protect their profitability through a strategy that corrupts the integrity of government.

The whole world is in peril from the raptors of Wall Street - the bird-brains of prey who eviscerated the American economy while feeding on sub-prime convertibles. Who for the past eight years, have been getting phat on a steady diet of shredded environmental protection regulations fed to them by their tenders in the Departments of Energy, Interior and the EPA.

Leaving behind a world where the lives of every living entity in the bio-sphere are at literal daily risk. And where many of our fellow sentient beings are rapidly and permanently disappearing during a period of escalating species extinctions.

With stakes this high, extended political standoff is unacceptable. It'd be nice to indulge in a bit of "Obama will fix it" euphoria, but this is serious children...this is big. There is a lot on the new president's plate, and politics being the art of compromise, on an issue this grave, with the forces of darkness so powerfully arrayed, I am not sanguine.

Solutions however sometimes really do come from thinking outside the box. And I am very interested in one example; an organization known as the Carbon Disclosure Project. A project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund that was established about 5 years ago.

The CDP takes a unique approach to breaking the deadlock. It bypasses government, and deals with climate change by directly approaching corporations with an offer they can't refuse. To report to investors, (and to the world, since the CDP's Annual Report is online) a full disclosure of the risk to corporate vialbility represented by the corporate carbon footprint and a description of their plan for management. Or? Or rist having members of the CDP, an organization representing investment funds concerned about the investment risk represented by global climate change. Typical participants would be pension funds, public employee retirement funds, etc. Currently nearly 400 such investment groups are members, representing about $50 trillion in investment capital.

It is the collective power of this group that is transformative. It places an immovable object in the path of any Fortune 500 corporation which heedlessly the exposure inherent in ignoring the CDP's annual request for a report on carbon risk. It accepts the inability of government to respond to the climate change crisis, and by passes it in favor of the described direct approach to Fortune 500 corporations, with a strategy which promises a future of corporate conformity to a culture of compliance with carbon risk management requirements. By requesting that Fortune 500 companies respond to a set of questions that serve to identify its' full carbon risk, and publishing who responds and who does not, the CDP creates an enormous and unavoidable pressure for compliance where it does the most good. The alternative is a decision to disinvestment, with $50 trillion talking.

The group's 2007 annual report makes a case for a growing corporate culture of decision-makers who now proactively recognize the need for a corporate strategy to manage and minimize risk related to climate change. Recognition is growing, of the potential for damage to long-term corporate health represented by operations that generate high carbon levels, through physical damage, employee welfare costs, litigation costs, and loss of corporate reputation.

It is a very hopeful approach to an otherwise worrisome issue. There is a short list of links below for anyone who would like to learn more about this group and the leadership it is providing in the climate change crisis.

Carbon Disclosure Project: Home
Carbon Disclosure Project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carbon Disclosure Project - Kosmix




DHL



Update: went for a drive - listened to a CD of Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis; here's "Autumn Leaves."