Jim Motavalli

The U.S. has a wealth of transportation experts, most of whom work for think tanks and produce thick reports nobody reads. But any one of them might have been a good choice for President Obama's secretary of transportation. Instead, he picked Ray LaHood, a Republican former congressman from Illinois with what the New York Times describes as a "thin" record on the issues.

LaHood's from a state that loves its ethanol, and is reportedly close to such pillars of the highway lobby as Caterpillar. He's been lukewarm on California's vital high-speed rail plan. He wins praise as a bipartisan consensus builder, however, and Obama is friendly with him.

The streets of San Francisco: congestion charging?

Most incoming administrations like to include at least one member of the other party in the cabinet, and often it's a post where they can't do a whole lot of harm. But transportation is a critical portfolio for the next four years. The secretary will have to help oversee the $17.4 billion auto bailout, and new federal fuel economy standards that should get us to 35 mpg by 2020. He'll have to try and fulfill Obama's plan for a million plug-in hybrids by 2015. And he'll have to be a big advocate for mass transit, considering that Obama is pledging to reduce climate emissions and our dependence on foreign oil.

LaHood does have a positive record on mass transit support, especially Amtrak subsidies. Congress needs to reapportion transportation money so transit gets a fair share. Right now, as the Times reported, 80 percent of gas taxes go to bridges and highways, and only 20 percent to transit. House Transportation Chair James Oberstar wants to allocate $42 million from the stimulus package so that public transportation gets $12 billion, and the insatiable highways $30 billion. Still skewed, but not quite as badly. LaHood needs to work for bipartisan support for such proposals.

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It was sobering to learn that the financial crisis that has paralyzed the domestic auto industry has now spread to Japan, where Toyota is projecting a $1.66 billion operating loss for the year that will end in March. This is a company that made $25.2 billion last year. Honda is also revising its sales projections and profit figures downward.

Management shakeups are also in the offing at Toyota, and the grandson of the founder is under consideration for the presidency. (This has echoes of William Clay Ford, Henry’s great-grandson, riding in as the white knight chairman in 1998.)

Two thousand nine will undoubtedly be a tough year for Toyota, but its losses pale compared to Detroit’s. And the company is in a good position to lead a repositioned, leaner and greener auto industry.

The 2010 Toyota Prius reportedly looks like this.

Toyota will offer some impressive new products at the Detroit Auto Show in January, including an all-new Prius (still with nickel-metal-hydride batteries). Styling is an evolution rather than a dramatic change, but the nose is more angular. Early indications are that the car is going to be slightly bigger (three inches in length, and one in width), with the engine growing from 1.5 to 1.8 liters. It will have a higher top speed, and some sources say a 10% fuel economy improvement. That’s a neat trick -- bigger, but with better mileage.

Toyota spokesman John Hanson says that Toyota will also be debuting a “dedicated” Lexus hybrid, the HS 250h, in Detroit, and according to Japanese sources it will have nickel-metal-hydride batteries (later to be replaced with lithium-ion in 2010) and a 2.5-liter gas engine, possibly a V-6. My guess is that this combination will not yield Prius-killing fuel economy numbers.

Lexus already has two hybrid sedans, both of them performance rather than economy cars, so I’m not sure why it needs another entry there. Honda is making a smarter move with its new Insight hybrid, which is designed to sell for under $20,000, with better fuel economy than the combined 42-mpg Civic Hybrid. That car will debut next spring.

Also very cool from Toyota is its ultra-compact iQ, which has unique four-passenger seating (one of the quartet has to be a child). The cute-as-a-button iQ is on the market in Japan, and could come here if the company is convinced there’s a market for it.

A Japanese magazine displayed this possible design for the Lexus HS 250h.

Finally, Toyota is bringing out its plug-in hybrid car. That car, with lithium-ion batteries, will be offered to fleet customers in Japan, Europe and North America in late 2009. Toyota is seriously into batteries, and Hanson points out the company owns 60% of a Japanese factory in partnership with Panasonic, and is building a second plant. By 2010, Toyota will be able to produce a million battery packs annually. Conventional Toyota hybrids are so far sticking with generally reliable nickel-metal-hydride batteries, he said.

“The rosetta stone is the battery,” Hanson says. “We’re now looking beyond lithium, and we think we’re further along than anybody. We have a million hybrids out there already, and we’re concerned about customers’ durability expectations when we introduce any new battery technology.”

So Toyota is wounded, but the medical team is positioning it for a full recovery.

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"Clean coal technology is something that can make America energy independent!...We put a man on the moon in 10 years. You can't tell me we can't figure out a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work!"

That was Barack Obama on the campaign trail. He believes in clean coal, and the industry trade group known as the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) -- which drew cries of amazement from journalists when it briefly featured the animated "Clean Coal Carolers" on its website -- has a new television ad out featuring the President-elect intoning those very words.

The Clean Coal Carolers: Heavenly voices of anthracite.

ACCCE will tell you, "Today, America's coal-based generating fleet is 70 percent cleaner (based upon regulated emissions per unit of energy produced) thanks, in part, to $50 billion invested in new technologies."

There is a tug of war for Obama's soul on this issue. Among the many priorities on the Obama/Biden "New Energy for America" website is this one: "Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology." But environmentalists consider the phrase "clean coal" to be an oxymoron. Most domestic coal (especially the less-polluting, harder anthracite) is obtained by lopping the tops off our beautiful, hardwood-topped Appalachian mountains in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. That "waste" material is then dumped in the valleys between the mountains, obliterating what were once clear-running streams -- and the lifeblood of hardscrabble communities.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is counterattacking with a new report that points out that ACCCE, which represents 48 coal and utility companies, has spent $45 million on slick advertising campaigns so far in 2008. But it has invested a relatively meager amount in actually developing the carbon capture and storage technology that would make clean coal a reality.

It's worth noting here that the co-chair of Obama's transition team, John Podesta, is the on-leave president and CEO of CAP, which has called for a renewable energy Marshall Plan to put people back to work. And Obama has personally embraced the concept for early implementation.

According to a CAP report, the 48 ACCCE companies made $57 billion in profits in 2007, but have invested only $3.5 billion in carbon capture research. "That means the companies combined made $17 in 2007 for every $1 invested in carbon capture over several years," the report said.

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Futurists have been talking about battery-powered electric cars for as long as there have been futurists. We’ve had viable electric vehicles since before the turn of the last century — New York City was plugging in taxis as early as 1897. Electric vehicles (EVs) offered serious competition to gasoline cars and trucks at least until the 1920s. Henry Ford was fascinated with them, and collaborated with his close friend Thomas Edison on an ultimately unsuccessful plan to bring one to market. Groundswells of interest in EVs arose in the late 1960s, in the early 1970s following the Arab oil embargo, and again when the Iranian oil spigot went dry after the 1979 revolution.

Now we’re all excited about EVs again. Nissan and Renault are gearing up to produce an electric sedan for the mass market by 2012. California-based Tesla Motors, though it has deep financial problems, is starting to roll $100,000 EVs down a production line. Electric versions of the BMW Mini and the Smart car are being tested. Start-ups Aptera and Fisker Automotive are exploring different corners of the market.

Despite all this activity, battery EVs won’t become a mass-market phenomenon until and unless there’s a standardized network of charging stations to plug them in. People will need to charge their EVs (which often have a range of 100 miles or less) at home, at work, and while out shopping, too. Carmakers have been wary of anything but small demonstration projects because that network didn’t exist, and cities, states and countries are unlikely to commit millions to build such an infrastructure without readily available cars.

And that’s where Israeli-born Shai Agassi and his company, Better Place, come in. ...

Chrysler may produce all three of these cool EV concept vehicles. (Chrysler photo)

Now it looks like they might all eventually go into showrooms. By 2010, Chrysler says it will be offering electric versions of a number of its current cars and trucks. "We're bringing all of our brands into this," said Doug Quigley, engineering executive for Chrysler's electric ENVI unit. "It's coming and it's real. These are real cars, not one-offs or science projects."

There are good and bad aspects of this first phase of Chrysler's plan. Piggy-backing on existing platforms is cost-effective, because it limits engineering costs. But electric cars work best when they're designed from the ground up. That way, they can be lightweight and designed around the battery packs. Shoehorning batteries into gasoline vehicles is often a compromise at best.

"People ask me what is different -- EVs have been around for a while," Quigley says. "I say what's different is we have viable high-energy storage systems."

Quigley says the biggest challenge facing Chrysler today is making sure that lithium-ion battery packs from outside suppliers actually will meet their manufacturers' claims about life cycle and durability. "They say they'll perform, but they have only six months of data because it's all so new."

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Most of the auto bailout coverage has focused on General Motors, because it's such a powerful symbol of American industrial collapse. Ford gets short shrift because it is still-barely-staying above water. And Chrysler has been very quiet lately, in part because of the secretive nature of its Cerberus Capital Management owners.

But Chrysler, despite being almost as badly off as GM, does have some interesting plans. Chrysler (which has some EV experience through the 40,000 GEM neighborhood electric cars its division has sold over the last 10 years) is clearly envious of all the attention the plug-in Chevrolet Volt has been getting. So last September it showed journalists a whole fleet of possible electric cars (including a small sports car based on a Lotus design, a Jeep Wrangler and a minivan), claiming that it would put at least one of them into production.

Chrysler may produce all three of these cool EV concept vehicles. (Chrysler photo)

Now it looks like they might all eventually go into showrooms. By 2010, Chrysler says it will be offering electric versions of a number of its current cars and trucks. "We're bringing all of our brands into this," said Doug Quigley, engineering executive for Chrysler's electric ENVI unit. "It's coming and it's real. These are real cars, not one-offs or science projects."

There are good and bad aspects of this first phase of Chrysler's plan. Piggy-backing on existing platforms is cost-effective, because it limits engineering costs. But electric cars work best when they're designed from the ground up. That way, they can be lightweight and designed around the battery packs. Shoehorning batteries into gasoline vehicles is often a compromise at best.

"People ask me what is different -- EVs have been around for a while," Quigley says. "I say what's different is we have viable high-energy storage systems."

Quigley says the biggest challenge facing Chrysler today is making sure that lithium-ion battery packs from outside suppliers actually will meet their manufacturers' claims about life cycle and durability. "They say they'll perform, but they have only six months of data because it's all so new."

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Avalon, New Jersey is a southern beach community known as "cooler by a mile," because a quirk of geography makes it a mile further out to sea than its neighbors on the Jersey Cape. If you were to stand on its sandy shore, where in the 1600s whalers put out to sea, and look due east you'd be likely to see a sailboat or two, maybe some distant commercial shipping, but nothing that's likely to send tourists elsewhere. And that's just the way this resort community likes it.

An artist's conception of one of Garden State Offshore Energy's latticework towers. (GSOE graphic)

By 2013, there may be a utility-sized, 96-turbine wind farm 20 miles off the Avalon coast, but with any luck the view from shore won't have changed. The project proposed by Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) Renewable Energy, a division of the state's largest utility, and Deepwater Wind will be so far out to sea (the nearest turbine is expected to be 16.2 statute miles from shore) that it is likely to be dimly visibly only on exceptionally clear days.

Wind projects are moving further out to sea, which provides several benefits to getting them approved, funded and producing energy. According to Paul Rosengren, a PSEG spokesperson, "One of the main advantages is that the project will be out of the sight of shore, so any potential impact to property values or tourism is alleviated. There's been some concern locally about having to look at a bunch of windmills -- this will be barely visible on the horizon on a very clear day. We expect the wind quality will be of higher quality that far from shore, and we're also taking the wind turbines away from the migratory patterns of birds."

Another advantage is easy replication. Rosengren says the far-offshore location is well away from shipping lanes, which will make it easier for New Jersey to achieve its recently announced and very ambitious goal of 2,000 to 3,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity. The Avalon project, operating as Garden State Offshore Energy (GSOE), will produce 350 megawatts.

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A former U.S. congressman told me today that Barack Obama's pick to be the next EPA administrator is Lisa Jackson, currently the head of the Department of Environmental Protection in New Jersey. "You can take that to the bank," he said. "It's a lock." Since Congress enjoys the full trust of the American people, there's no reason to doubt the man.

Lisa Jackson: Environmental friend or foe?

Jackson seems to have a lot of friends in the Garden State. She had just been tapped by Democratic Governor Jon Corzine as his next chief of staff. "The governor picked someone who is probably the brightest and most knowledgeable person on government in his administration," Jeff Tittel of the state's Sierra Club chapter said. "Hopefully it will help the administration focus more on the environment."

Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts (D-Camden) also liked her [for chief of staff], calling Jackson "a superb pick," describing her as "a talented mind and a steady hand."

Jackson had been DEP Commissioner since 2006, and served in the EPA from 1987 to 2002. She wrote New Jersey's global warming law and was heavily involved in Superfund administration for the tri-state area including New York and Connecticut.

Plenty Magazine reports that Jackson "looks increasingly likely to take over the Environmental Protection Agency when the president-elect takes office....Jackson had reportedly been running neck-and-neck with California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols for the EPA gig, but according to unnamed sources moved to the top of the heap when California Democrat Henry Waxman won the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. With San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi overseeing the House climate battle and California Senator Barbara Boxer on point in the Senate, the Obama transition team apparently feared that Nichols would be a Californian too far."

But not everybody likes her. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), she "embraced policies at DEP echoing the very practices at the Bush EPA....DEP employees describe Ms. Jackson as employing a highly politicized approach to decision-making that resulted in suppression of scientific information, issuance of gag orders and threats agtainst professional staff members who dared to voice concerns. These reports raise troubling questions about her fitness to run an agency of much greater size and complexity."

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It may come as a surprise to learn that the meat industry contributes 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector. It's true, and you can find the details in a 2006 United Nations report entitled "Livestock's Long Shadow."

This is not only because cows emit methane, which is a global warming gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, but because of all the land use changes, the production of animal feed, the shipment of all that meat around the world, and other factors.

Given that reality, I found intriguing the idea that the meat industry can somehow "give back" with a product that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels. Green Earth Technologies' new automotive motor oil is "made with American-grown renewable animal fats....It takes three barrels of crude oil to make one barrel of motor oil, but it only takes one barrel of animal fat to produce one barrel of G-Oil," the company says.

I talked to Dr. Mat Zuckerman, GET's newly named president, about how it all works, and the rest of this story may not be for the squeamish. "We buy the fat from the rendering industry [which sells waste meat products as a base material for a wide variety of products], and we consider it a renewable resource that is also fully biodegradable," he said. "Motor oil is a base material plus additives, and by adjusting the additives you make products for different automotive applications. In this case we're using nanotechnology to substitute fats for petroleum distillates to make the base."

Here's the technical part: The saturated fats in animal products have molecular single-bond carbon chains that are similar to that of standard petroleum-based oils. "If you look at other bio-based fuels -- biodiesel, ethanol -- none are scaled to the raw material," Zuckerman said. "But we could supply the entire U.S. oil needs with the fat from 50,000 beef cattle a day that are already being killed in slaughterhouses." Each cow could produce 110 quarts of oil, he said.

It shouldn't be hard to find raw material. Zuckerman says that 50,000 cows are killed daily within 150 miles of where G-Oil is produced in the panhandle of Oklahoma. It's the fifth largest red meat slaughter area in the world.

G-Oil actually got written into a recent episode of CSI: NY. The plot revolved around the idea that a bio-based oil would attract flies, which in actual fact G-Oil does not do. I asked publicist Courtney Jacobs if, since the product is biodegradable, you could just pour it on the compost pile when it's lubricating life is over. "Let's put it this way," she said. "If a deer dies on your lawn it's going to create a brown spot for about a year, but then the grass will come back greener than ever. It won't be environmentally harmful, but it's still probably better to take it to a recycling center with other oils."

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The annual auto shows are usually an opportunity for the world's carmakers to put on the ritz, but these are straitened times. I've seen carmakers set up indoor off-road courses and let thrill-crazed journalists romp through them in mud-splattered Jeeps, but this was not one of those years.

Ford's Fusion Hybrid: a car of the future.

General Motors, whose CEO was in Washington begging for a $25 billion bailout, decided that it would not, after all, introduce its new Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CTS Coupe at this week's Los Angeles Auto Show. GM is burning through $2 billion in cash a month, and could run out of money early next year. Its sales declined 45 percent in October.

Chrysler, also burning through billions, declined to showcase any new models in Los Angeles or hold the usual gala press conferences.

Ford, with sales down 18 percent this year, could afford to debut new models because it just earned $540 million selling the lion's share of its stake in Mazda. The 2010 Mustang may get the headlines, but probably more important to the future of the company are a pair of hybrid sedans, the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan.

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The Stirling heat engine was invented by a Scotsman in 1816, but that doesn't stop Dean Kamen from using this new-old technology to create a unique hybrid vehicle.

Dean Kamen is probably best known for the creation of the Segway personal transportation device. And when he talks, people tend to listen. In addition to the somewhat whimsical Segway, his New Hampshire-based company DEKA Research has invented numerous breakthrough medical devices, including the AutoSyringe (a wearable device that dispenses medications on schedule), and Hydroflex, an irrigation pump for laproscopy and other procedures. He's won numerous awards for his inventions, including the Global Humanitarian Action Award from the UN, and numerous honorary doctorates.

The Deka Revolt: Best of both worlds?

But the 2008 DEKA Revolt is something else again. The basic car is a 1999 or 2000 Think City, a plastic-bodied two-seat electric car built in Norway. The company was briefly owned by Ford (1999 to 2003), and the Kamen car dates from that era. Under the name Think Global, the now-independent company has been infused with new venture capital and is once again operating internationally from a base in Aurskog, Norway. It is now selling battery cars in Scandinavia and soon to the rest of Europe. A decision on the U.S. will be made next year.

Against this backdrop, Kamen said he contacted Think approximately a year ago with the idea of turning a small battery electric EV into a mild hybrid equipped with a rear-mounted Stirling engine. The Stirling, which works by heating and cooling pressurized gases, can run on a wide variety of fuels, including gasoline, E85 ethanol and other biofuels, propane, natural gas and methane.

The next thing he knew, Kamen says, a large crate arrived on his loading dock. Inside was a disassembled Think, which he retrofitted with a two-kilowatt Stirling engine (soon to be replaced with a much larger 10-kilowatt version), a small fuel tank, a custom-made 18.3-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack using Kokum America batteries, and a 55-horsepower Azure Dynamics electric motor.

After some head scratching at the New Hampshire Department of Motor Vehicles-was the car a 2000 or a 2008? -- the car was finally registered as a brand-new 2008 DEKA Revolt and began running around Manchester, New Hampshire. And soon it was Dean Kamen's personal transportation.

The Stirling engine does not power the wheels; instead, it provides heat and defrosting and powers accessories to avoid depleting the batteries. And, even better, it can trickle-charge the battery pack so that the driving range can be greatly extended. At speeds below 40 miles per hour, Kamen said, the Stirling should be able to recharge the batteries at the same rate as they're being depleted. Getting stranded with dead batteries won't be a problem, either, because you can run the Stirling for a short while and recharge them.

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Van Jones talks in perfectly shaped sound bites, which is great when you're having him as a guest on your radio show.

The author of the new book The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne) alighted on my WPKN-FM show between engagements with Tavis Smiley, Fox News, CNN and the Colbert Report, and he sprayed bullet-point ideas like clips from an AK-47.

Jones, whose book made it onto the New York Times bestseller list through a well-coordinated media campaign, thinks the Obama administration should hit the ground running with Green New Deal programs that will achieve the three-in-one of combating global warming, jump-starting renewable energy and getting us out of the recession.

Jones wants to empower a Clean Energy Corps modeled on the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps to "retrofit America" by weatherizing millions of leaky homes, small businesses, schools and other public buildings. Like Sarah Palin, he invokes "Joe Sixpack," but he sees him "in a green hard hat installing windows and wielding a caulk gun."

The program would include volunteers, people in job training programs and permanent employment, too, and the recruits would come from every spectrum of society, including prison. Jones' Civic Justice Corps would give ex-offenders a new career and a green job.

"The Bush administration left us with a big mess," Jones told me. "We need solutions that solve a lot of problems all at once." The process of putting people to work installing solar panels and making wind turbines, he said, will "require thousands of contracts and millions of jobs -- producing billions of dollars in economic stimulus."

Jones notes wryly that the $700 billion bailout gives bipartisan endorsement to the idea of taking government handouts. If it's good enough for Citigroup, Wells Fargo and AIG...But Jones is somewhat wary of handing a blank check to the embattled auto industry unless it gets its priorities straight.

"The big dogs barking for bailout money has drowned out common sense," he said. "We've had too narrow a view of what to do with our industrial sector. We need to think about what we want to make in America. We should be using our Boeing-level engineering talent to manufacture wind turbines, which are made with 20 tons of steel and 8,000 parts. We should be making solar panels, hybrid buses and light rail cars."

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President-elect Barack Obama went into the Motor City's lion's den last year, speaking before a sold-out audience convened by the Detroit Economic Club. He told the assembled business and political leaders not what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear.

"'For years," he said, "while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in bigger, faster cars....Here in Detroit, three giants of American industry are hemorrhaging jobs and profits as foreign competitors answer the rising global demand for fuel-efficient cars....The need to drastically change our energy policy is no longer a debatable proposition. It is not a question of whether, but how; not a question of if, but when. For the sake of our security, our economy, our jobs and our planet, the age of oil must end in our time."

Obama then described a plan to subsidize 10 percent of the Big Three's retiree health care costs (as much as $7 billion) if the companies would invest half of that savings in fuel-efficiency research. His alternative idea was $3 billion over 10 years to remake auto plants for a new generation of clean cars.

Obama wants a million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, a plan that could be derailed by insufficient lithium-ion battery capacity by then. He has a 10-year, $150 billion renewable energy plan.

Felix Kramer of CalCars.org, an early and consistent voice for plug-in hybrids, thinks the Obama plan is achievable. "Scaling up to produce a million plug-in vehicles in six years is far less challenging than what auto industry achieved after Pearl Harbor, switching in a year from cars and trucks to tanks and planes," he said. "And supplying batteries for those vehicles is attainable, especially since we have good enough technology to get started now."

Kramer also likes Obama's plan to have half of all new federal new car purchases by 2012 all-electric or plug-in. "That firm commitment to purchase 30,000 or more vehicles annually will be welcome to carmakers gearing up to produce plug-ins. It won't be hard to deliver," he said.

All well and good. But none of the proposals Obama has put on the table so far, by themselves, will turn around the increasingly dire situation for American automakers, which have indeed let foreign companies take the lead in fuel efficiency. The automakers need immediate and concentrated help, and they need clear direction. It's hard to see how a GM/Chrysler merger--bringing together two companies with SUV-heavy product lines--is a clear answer.

It's a cliche to say that Obama has a lot on his plate. But he can't defer action on the auto industry for long. He clearly understands the issues, and the imperatives of a quick turnaround. The Senator from Illinois is proving adept at getting his transition team in place. Let's hope that putting the ailing automakers on a green path is a day one priority.

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