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1. Daimler to Launch Car2Go Pilot in Austin: Hint, Hint Zipcar
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2. Michelin Sponsors 2009 ALMS Green Challenge
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3. Turn Off Your Lights Tomorrow—Saturday—For Earth Hour! What You Do After That Is Your Business
Daimler to Launch Car2Go Pilot in Austin: Hint, Hint Zipcar
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
Daimler will place 200 Smart Fortwo cars with micro-hybrid drive throughout the city. If you’re a registered member, you can pre-book the cars online or via mobile phone, or check out an available vehicle on the spot (once you register, you can swipe in using a card reader on the windshield, like ZipCar). When you’re done, you can return the car to any unoccupied parking space within a set operation area. And they charge by the minute, hour or day — so you don’t have to pay for more than you actually use. Brilliant!
OK, clearly some things could go wrong. What if there aren’t enough cars to go around? What if you get stranded and all the car2go vehicles are in use? And just how big is this operation area, anyway? It would have to be more than a few city blocks to solve my Point A-B problem. But this still sounds like an improvement that could help make a carshare/mass transit combo more practical, a step toward weaning more people from reliance on personal vehicles. Hey Daimler, how about launching a pilot in San Francisco?
Michelin Sponsors 2009 ALMS Green Challenge
khallgeisler - Bikes & Cars
The American Le Mans Series will revive its Green X Challenge Award with Michelin tires as the sponsor for 2009. The prototype and GT cars that acheives the best performance and fuel efficiency with the fewest emissions will win the award.
Lest you doubters think Michelin is jumping on the green bandwagon, they’ve been rewarding eco-friendly innovations for a while now. Eleven years ago, they created the Challenge Bibendum for clean vehicles, then in 2006 sponsored the Michelin Energy Endurance Challenge at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. In 2008, it extended the Energy Endurance Challenge to all European Le Mans-series races.
For its part, ALMS has been making the most inroads into green racing, with hybrid, biofuel, and clean diesels at the starting line. ALMS President and CEO Scott Atherton has applauded President Barack Obama’s green auto initiatives, and sees the track as a proving ground for new consumer technologies.
Racing will probably never be as clean a sport as, say, competitive tree planting, but initiatives like the Michelin’s Green X Challenge can help sate our need for speed and our preference for breathing cleaner air.
Photo of the E85-powered Corvette at the last ALMS race of 2008 courtesy of American Le Mans.
Turn Off Your Lights Tomorrow—Saturday—For Earth Hour! What You...
susan - Sustainable Ideas
Go dark! Tomorrow – Saturday, 3-28-09 – is Earth Hour when cities, and businesses and tens of millions of people like yourself all over the world will be turning off their lights for one hour – from 8:30 to 9:30 PM (your time) – in honor of saving energy to save the entire planet.
Join in – flip those switches to OFF and feel the powerful energy of tens of millions of others, like yourself, sitting happily in the dark, saving energy. Do it with a friend — it’s more fun that way.
Anybody who is anybody will be tuning in and turning off, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which has organized this delightful plunge into the dark. Nearly 200 cities in the U.S. are officially committed; 2400 cities in 82 countries have officially signed on.
Broadway theater marquees and other world-renowned landmarks will be turning off their lights:
- Empire State Building
- Rockefeller Center
- Chrysler Building
- Golden Gate Bridge,
- Space Needle
- Sears Tower
- Great Pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt
- Acropolis in Greece
For those of you with short attention spans who have difficulty reading past the first word " Earth" and are confused – this is not Earth Day – it's a little dress rehearsal. So if you are reading this after Saturday, and you didn't get to join in the dark-hour fun, you can still make up for it to the gods of green on April 22, 2009, for the big Earth Day.
Turning off is a big turn-on.
Watch this video of the lights going out: Earth Hour in Years Past
Even the Las Vegas strip is turning lights off. And like Vegas, what you do during Earth Hour, stays in Earth Hour.
LINKS:
30 Second PSA voiced by Cate Blanchett
Want a minute-by-minute account? Here's a new iPhone application "Earth Hour Trainer":
Photo credit: 2witches.com/blog/tag/earth/
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