This Honda Civic Hybrid is on Japanese police duty. (Credit: Flickr/Kenjonbro)

Can snazzier batteries jump-start Honda's hybrid sales? The Honda Civic Hybrid is planning to switch to lithium-ion batteries in a bid to make it more competitive with the embattled Toyota Prius (which has the lion's share of the hybrid market).

Li-ion is, of course, the default battery for nearly all the world's coming plug-in EVs, and it has by far the greatest energy density of any available chemistry. Hybridcars.com reports that li-ion packs could even be cheaper than the nickel-metal packs standard in hybrids today.

While not the biggest deal in the world, it's still very significant--the only hybrid to use li-ion right now is the Mercedes S400, and that's in a whole other price category. Bloomberg got its scoop, as it often does, from its Japanese reporters (Makkio Kitamura and Yuki Hagiwara). Honda Executive Vice President Koichi Kondo told them in a Tokyo interview that the Civic Hybrid would have li-ion within the next two to three years. "Lithium will become a lot more prevalent," he said.

Honda's li-ion plans hadn't made it to this side of the world. A U.S.-based Honda spokesman told me, "I suspect you read the same story I did. That's the first I'd heard of it and now you and I know the same very limited amount. It is way too soon to disclose details of any kind regarding the next-generation Civic, and I assure you that would be the answer provided by anyone (PR or executive) in North America."

The Civic Hybrid is produced at the company's Suzuka factory in Japan, and most of the news about upcoming hybrids emanates from over there. It's interesting, though, that 84% of the cars Honda sold in the U.S. last year were actually produced in North America.

Li-ion can store twice the energy of nickel-metal-hydride, so not only could the new Civic Hybrid have a smaller and lighter battery, it could possibly also have significant electric-only range (like a plug-in hybrid without a plug). I can envision a Civic Hybrid that could travel 10 to 15 miles on batteries alone. Toyota is switching to li-ion, too, but for the plug-in hybrid it will introduce in two years.

The other day in the office we were joking around about the different "hat colors" for SEOs (search engine optimizers)--you know, black hat, white hat and so on, for the efforts people make to get pages to rank highly on Google and other engines. I mentioned it to my buddy Arch Carey, who is a talented iPhone sketch artist. (He's the guy behind OM-NOM-NOMNITURE.)

We got to thinking, what would the various SEO hats actually look like? Here's what we came up with, thanks to great suggestions from the rest of The Daily Green team:

Black Hat SEO

The dark ninjas of the net, black hat SEOs try to trick search engines into ranking their sites higher by any means necessary. They often hawk scams and dubious products, and engage in such Google-banned practices as link farming, page hijacking, cloaking, keyword stuffing, link buying, spamming and other evil arts that clog up the Intertubes and give legit SEOs a bad name.

White Hat SEO

White hats worship at the altar of Google, and follow the TOCs (terms of service) of search engines to the letter. Unconcerned with "gaming" rankings, instead they focus on trying to lay out everything as clearly and transparently as possible.

Gray Hat SEO

Gray Hats avoid the activities that are expressly banned by search engines and by the Internet community. But they aren't above trying to aggressively outrank the competition through link building, use of social media, smart use of RSS and building partnerships with other sites.

Coda's sedan is just one of a small fleet of battery cars appearing in 2010. (Credit: Coda Automotive)

Nobody knows how many people will be lined up at the dealership doors with checkbooks on hand when the new wave of battery electric and plug-in hybrid cars--including the Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt, Coda sedan, Fisker Karma, Wheego Whip Life and BYD E6--enter the market by the end of the year.

It's a no-brainer that green cars--if they're produced in sufficient numbers--will be a boon to the economy, and a rare lift for American auto manufacturing. A new report issued Tuesday by the Center for American Progress, the United Auto Workers and the Natural Resources Defense Council concludes that new vehicle technology could create as many 150,000 U.S. jobs (whether they'll also be unionized is anyone's guess).

Many of those jobs will flee overseas, the report says, unless the Department of Energy continues to subsidize car and battery plants on American soil. "We want to reduce carbon pollution and many unemployed people want to return to work, and building better cars can help with both," said Peter Kehner, executive director of NRDC. The report estimates that the U.S. could capture as much as 75 percent of the "total technology value" (and the same percentage of job benefits) from the new green cars.

Any potential for job creation, of course, is tied to the size of the market for green cars. Several players in the emerging EV industry, from suppliers and auto companies, testified in a little-noticed Senate hearing in February, talking about what could be "a very significant demand gap," as Mary Ann Wright of battery maker Johnson Controls described it. She said the worldwide capacity to build EVs by 2015 could be four million vehicles, but there might be demand for only two million.

The solution, as the suppliers saw it, was for the federal government to step up in the short term and not provide start-up capital for American plants, but actually buy large fleets of green cars. "These fleet programs are a great way to stimulate demand," Wright said.

As a longtime The Daily Green blogger, on the occasion of the publication of my second book, The Conscious Kitchen, I’m using my "Ask An Organic Mom" space for the next 8 weeks – give or take – to invite you to join me on the Conscious Kitchen Challenge.

What does it mean to have a Conscious Kitchen? It's a little different for every person, but at its heart, it means knowing where your food comes from, what it is, and how good it is (or isn't) for you and for the environment. It also encompasses the energy it takes to cook, what you're cooking on and storing food in, and even how you clean up and handle waste.

We all know we need to be eating better foods – local, organic, local and organic, humanely raised meat, wild and well-caught fish, packaged foods containing five pronounceable ingredients or less – but they’re not always so easy to find. Or it’s not always so easy to motivate to find them. Think of this like you think of New Year’s resolutions. Choose your own personal goal – make it attainable for better success – and then together we’ll methodically get you there. Keep in mind that any conscious steps are better than no conscious steps – 10 percent is better than no percent.