Running On Air

By Cernig

The car that runs on water may be a DFH cliche - but how about one that runs on air?

An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town.

The OneCAT will be a five-seater with a glass fibre body, weighing just 350kg and could cost just over £2,500.

It will be driven by compressed air stored in carbon-fibre tanks built into the chassis.

The tanks can be filled with air from a compressor in just three minutes - much quicker than a battery car.

Alternatively, it can be plugged into the mains for four hours and an on-board compressor will do the job.

For long journeys the compressed air driving the pistons can be boosted by a fuel burner which heats the air so it expands and increases the pressure on the pistons. The burner will use all kinds of liquid fuel.

The designers say on long journeys the car will do the equivalent of 120mpg. In town, running on air, it will be cheaper than that.

Do you think all the Bush conservatives who said that advances in technology would remove the need for carbon caps will be first in line for this vehicle? Of course not - they'll still want their fully-loaded gas-guzzling urban tractors.

An old boss of mine, a conservative of the most radical kind, once asked me what I thought of the massive Hummer he was thinking of buying. I told him I wasn't insecure about my dick size.

Government & The Environment

by shamanic

There's a piece in the Post about carbon offsets that the House purchased this year for $89,000 and the projects that were funded with the money, and there's just something incongruous about the whole idea.

Here's how I see it: last year I purchased a small carbon offset through Georgia Power and I pay an extra $5 or $10 per month on my monthly bill to, in theory, fund greener energy sources in my state like methane reclamation, solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal. They've got a page on the web that discusses the various options in the region. I can't say whether Georgia Power uses the money for those things and I can't tell you if a single other Georgian household purchased these offsets through the program, but it seemed to me that I could, as a consumer, represent a market force that wants cleaner energy sources. Hopefully others have joined the program too and are also demonstrating to the suits at Southern Company (which owns Georgia Power) that these things are a worthy and profitable investment.

But I'm just one person, or perhaps one "household" in corporate-speak. I don't have the power of the federal government backing my consumer decisions, and I can't pass laws or fund projects that would cause a semi-permanent improvement in the situation. I'm sure the House did more than just buy carbon offsets to go to questionable projects, but really, they could pass a bill mandating the planting of a million new trees on federal land each year, and fund it for probably about the same cost.

I understand the impulse to "go green" and do simple little things to save energy and conserve resources, but if you're the US House of Representatives, you really should dream bigger than that. You don't have to go through brokers to achieve your ends, you can pass laws that create small, intelligent, funded programs and make a real difference. There's something depressing about the idea that the federal government is using the same methods I am to impact the environment. It has so much more power than I do, and it appears to have squandered it.