General Motors has some real clunkers for which it waves a green flag. Take the new $71,685 Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, which goes on sale this month. It costs $3,600 more than a standard Escalade, and achieves fuel economy of...20 mpg in town and 21 on the highway. Sure, the conventional Escalade is much worse at 12 and 15 mpg, but even as an innovative dual-mode hybrid, the Sierra Club is not going to be celebrating its release.

The all-new Cruze: 40 mpg?

GM should see waving flags in its sales numbers. The Escalade, for instance, was down more than 40 percent from July 2007 to July 2008. Nobody wants big SUVs.

But GM has some models that do deserve attention, such as the Cobalt Xtra Fuel Economy (XFE). For 2009, that one gets a very impressive 37 highway mpg (one mpg more than in 2008), a feat it achieves via variable valve timing, a new and taller final drive and trick tires with low rolling resistance.

The Cobalt is kind of plain-jane, but it's got bragging rights. When it was introduced last year, the XFE was six percent of Cobalt sales; now it's 15 percent. Through July, the 2008 Cobalt was a whopping 29 percent of total Chevrolet sales. The Cobalt line is only around through the 2010 model year, however, and will be replaced by the all-new Cruze (which rides on GM's compact Delta platform).

Initial reports have said the Cruze, built in Lordstown, Ohio and around the world, will get more than 40 mpg, but there's also news that the car will be larger than the Cobalt -- a danger sign.

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I was looking for the epicenter of the solar revolution, and I found it at the Gathering of the Vibes.

Imagine a hippie rock festival so immaculately dedicated to the Woodstock legacy that a late-night performance by Phil Lesh and his (much younger) friends was treated like a visitation from the Gods. Imagine tie-dye as the uniform of choice, and the Bridgeport, Connecticut sea breezes scented with the aroma of much marijuana. It was there that I discovered the Solar Bus.

Although it is normally to be found in northern Vermont, the brush-painted Solar Bus was temporarily relocated to Bridgeport, where its roof-mounted solar array was recharging hippie cellphones and running a bubbling fountain and some hopping frog toys. At night, it ran a projector that showed cartoons to delighted camping children.

It is by no means coincidental that the owner of the Solar Bus, Gary Beckwith, is a former Deadhead. A wiry young man with a full head of black curls, he gravitates to summer festivals like the Vibes and Vermont's Solar Fest (which begins with a thanks to Mother Nature and a ceremonial invocation to the equinox).

But despite the countercultural trappings, Beckwith is a serious techie who has done great things with his Solar Bus, a 1982 Crown Supercoach that moved California school kids until 2003.

"We yanked out the seats, put some solar panels on the roof, gave it a paint job, and started driving around showing and teaching people about the real uses of renewable energy," says Beckwith.

Let me guess: Up to this point you probably thought that the Solar Bus was actually powered by solar, didn't you? Isn't that why they call it a solar bus?

The solar panels actually power appliances and even the occasional rock music stage, but they are hardly able to give a large steel bus much driving range.

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The Hummer may be a symbol of everything environmentalists hate, but there's one part of it that could win a "much improved" award -- the tailpipe. Although the Hummer guzzles gas like a supertanker, it also benefits from modern emissions control technology.

Bill Clinton's 1967 Mustang: Scrapped for $500?

The average new car emits only a 10^th as many hydrocarbons as the average car on the road, and a 20^th of 1960s cars. A 1962 VW Bug undoubtedly causes more smog than a 2008 Ford Expedition.

The idea of "cash for clunkers" programs is that they get the gross polluters off the road. According to a California study cited by the New York Times, cars that are 13 years old or older cover only 25 percent of the miles driven, but cause 75 percent of the air pollution. The dirtiest 10 percent emit 59 percent of hydrocarbons and 47 percent of all carbon monoxide, says the California Air Resources Board.

Thirty percent of the 250 million cars and trucks on U.S. roads are at least 15 years old, so there are 75 million potential "clunkers" out there, the Times said.

These takeback programs have been tried out in several states and Canadian provinces, but they run into an implacable opponent: The classic car owner. Although the programs are voluntary, they deprive classic owners of access to old clunker "parts cars." One man's junk is another's treasure, apparently.

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It's fascinating to watch Honda's hybrid strategy unfold. I have been, for years, predicting that Honda would "hybridize" its best-selling Fit hatchback. And that's finally likely to happen. But Honda is also planning something rather better: It's finally coming out with a ground-up, clean-sheet-of-paper Prius-killer.

The two generations of the Toyota Prius have sold an incredible 757,000 (630,000 of them 2004 and beyond). Honda has sold only 277,000 hybrids total, despite being first out of the gate in the U.S. (1999) with the two-seater Insight. Although the Insight was a dedicated hybrid like the Prius, its limited seating and bare-bones accommodations turned off many buyers.

But Honda will introduce an all-new model in calendar year 2009 that, according to spokesman Chris Naughton, will be "on a platform not shared with any other model, in other words, not available in non-hybrid form."

As Naughton puts it, the Insight "made a few people very happy." The new model could make a lot of people very happy, and get the company a long way to its goal of 500,000 hybrid sales a year. It will probably be a five-door hatchback smaller than the current Prius, and sell for less-around $18,000, reports Business Week. The U.S., Japan and Europe are targeted.

Honda President Takeo Fukui acknowledged in a recent mea culpa (May 21 in Tokyo) that Toyota has had the better hybrid strategy. But he plans to remedy that aggressively, not only with the new car for 2009 but also the long-denied hybrid version of the Fit (which would get what, 50 mpg?) and even a hybrid sports car, the CR-Z.

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Dave Buchko, an advanced powertrain spokesperson for BMW, recently delivered the company's Hydrogen 7 car to me for a test drive.

Unlike other fuel-cell based models from competitors, the Hydrogen 7 carries in its trunk a bullet-proof, drop-proof and crash-resistant tank of ultra-cold liquid hydrogen. The futuristic Beamer can burn regular unleaded or liquid hydrogen in its beefy V12.

Here, Buchko talks about his valuable charge:

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“In some cases, the exhaust from the Hydrogen 7 is cleaner than the actual air,” Dave Buchko tells me. We are standing in my driveway next to his charge, a heavily art-directed BMW, which has the words “Clean Energy” emblazoned on its side. I am not tempted to breathe in its exhaust, however clean it may be.

Buchko, who is an advanced powertrain spokesman for BMW, delivered the car to me and brought his young son, Jamie, along for the ride. Given that his family's involved, I believe what he's saying about the safety of hydrogen (no visions of the Hindenburg for him) and the bullet-proof, drop-proof and crash-resistant nature of its hydrogen tank.

BMW's Dave Buchko, son Jamie and BMW's Hydrogen 7.

The Hydrogen 7 has a detuned 12-cylinder, internal-combustion engine. Normally cars with V-12s are horrible gas guzzlers. The standard-issue big boy known as the 760Li gets a miserable combined fuel economy of 15 miles per gallon, and will if allowed consume 22.8 barrels of oil annually. The fairly luxurious H7 runs on gasoline if you want it to, but a push of the “H2” button and its taking in hydrogen from the big cryogenic tank that occupies half the trunk.

Why cryogenic? Well ...

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It's a big government report, with charts and graphs. If you've ignored every other technical paper from an agency with a long name, it sure looks like you can cheerfully deep-six the one released last week, since it contains phrases like "World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 57 percent from 2004 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 95 percent, compared with an increase of 24 percent in the OECD countries."

What's an OECD country?* Who cares, right? But actually this report from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) is kind of a big deal, because of what it says about the collision course between business as usual and our climate and peak oil realities. The report makes a lot of assumptions, among them continued rising energy demand for the next two decades, mainly from the Third World (and especially China). It says that those cries of "Oil! Oil!" will push prices to $186 a barrel. What's more, coal will stay on the front burner as our largest source of electricity.

This is plainly impossible, both from the planet's point of view and the cold facts about our energy economy.

Coal is the biggest global warming aggravator, and climate visionaries such as NASA's James Hansen, not to mention myriad and increasingly vocal college students, are calling for "No New Coal." Soaring oil prices have already put a big crimp in demand, and it's far from clear we would even have it to pump if EIA's projections bear out.

The federal government needs to do energy outlooks, but this one is likely to be far off the mark. For instance, on June 19 China (the second-largest oil consumer today) announced steep 17 percent hikes in gasoline and diesel prices "to rein in energy consumption," according to Bloomberg.com. Electricity is going up, too, which should at least dent coal use.

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Stranded in the Minneapolis airport as hailstones the size of quarters pounded the tarmac, I turned to the local Star Tribune. Responding to an article entitled "Is This the End of the SUV?" a letter writer noted that 76 percent of Americans still drive to work alone, mostly in huge, off-road vehicles.

It's the way of things, the writer added: "When supply and demand go through their natural fall and gas seems cheap again, people will buy big cars."

Today's oil troubles are unlikely to fade away like the 1970s Arab oil embargo.

The letter writer has history on his side, but I think he -- and the many Americans who agree with him -- are wrong this time. The Arab oil embargo and the gas lines it engendered did indeed give small cars a great ride for a few years in the 1970s. (At the height of the crisis, by the way, gas was selling for $1.20 a gallon, and oil was $11 a barrel.) When that artificial shortage ended, the big cars were soon back in the showrooms, followed soon after by the first popular SUVs.

But that's unlikely to happen again. The fundamentals are entirely different now. Americans are finally driving less. Demand will likely drop in 2008, a milestone we haven't seen in 17 years. At the same time, more than half the new car registrations are for passenger vehicles, not trucks. The death of the SUV is upon us.

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I've just been on the highway to the future, and it felt great! This very green roadway was inside a big blue trailer-tractor parked by Toyota on the New Haven, Connecticut green during its big International Arts & Ideas festival.

Toyota on the green in New Haven, CT. Is its stellar reputation in trouble?

I shuffled in and was given a free packet of organic basil seeds. A bar code on the packet could be scanned to accumulate "highway miles." I correctly guessed that 2007 was the 10th birthday of the Prius, and that Toyota builds cars in Georgetown, Kentucky.

The touchscreen graphics were really cool and the message was green to a fault. The trailer was packed with a couple of dozen players, all racking up their miles. I earned 550 and won the right to plant a tree, which I chose to locate in Indiana.

One wants to believe in Toyota. Since '97 it has sold a million hybrids around the world. It was right about the Prius, which accounts for a whopping 72 percent of all hybrid sales. What people wanted was a unique, high-mileage hybrid vehicle that made a statement about their green commitment. To date, only Toyota has delivered that.

Toyota has also purchased 100 percent green power, planted trees, has "living in harmony with the Earth" as one of its guiding principles, and on and on.

So it was kind of disturbing to see the company linked to human trafficking and sweatshop abuses. According to a 65-page report made public by the National Labor Committee June 18, Priuses are "made by low-wage temps." The report says that a third of the company's assembly-line workers in Japan are temporary, "have few rights and earn less than 60 percent of what full-time workers do."

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The day oil hit $138 a barrel, I was in ultra-rich Greenwich, Connecticut looking at 16-cylinder cars and thinking about how history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. It was the 13th annual Greenwich Concours d'Elegance, presenting an overpowering collection of Packards, Duesenbergs and Pierce Arrows.

Show judging at the Greenwich Concours.

Why don't we see these marques today? Because they misread the market and offered big, powerful and expensive cars during the depths of a Depression. Sound familiar? At least gas was cheap back then. Does GM have an excuse for filling its showrooms with Tahoes, Sierras and Hummers when average folk are having to choose between putting gas in the tank and food on the table?

I stood in awe before a 1937 Delahaye 135 M Roadster with an unbelievably gorgeous, over-the-top streamlined body by Figoni and Falaschi. French-made Delahayes could fetch as much as $20,000 (just for the chassis, without a body!). In the 1930s, the average American salary was $1,368. A year. Can you buy a Delahaye today? No, you cannot.

Oil prices have doubled in the last year. Automakers are frantically shutting pickup and SUV plants and making hasty plans for new subcompacts with four-cylinder engines. GM is likely to put Hummer on the block for peanuts.

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Arjun N. Murti is an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and he made headlines this week when he predicted that crude oil would soon go to $200 a barrel. You don't really have to be an expert to make that call — petroleum prices are plainly out of control, and there's little reason to expect them to return to pre-crisis levels.

High oil prices: feel the pain.

That price will mean $6 a gallon at the pumps, a level of pain that I'm sure most Americans don't want to contemplate. But contemplate it we must. As I typed this, the price was over $135 a barrel, and Democratic leaders in Congress were having a field day excoriating outrageously compensated oil executives at a hearing that turned into an inquisition. They've done that before -- it plays well back in the districts -- but vitriol alone won't make prices go down. Big Oil is cashing in, but it's riding trends set on the international spot market.

One of the most prescient observers on the subject of peak oil is the writer James Howard Kunstler, whose nonfiction book The Long Emergency envisioned a post-oil economy that disenfranchises large sections of the Southwest (we won't be able to air-condition it) and suburbia (not viable without motorized transportation).

Kunstler's latest book, World Made by Hand, is a novel that takes this idea even further. It envisions a dystopia in which transportation is difficult, food is locally grown and centralized government is slowly disappearing. It's bleak, and maybe unlikely, but definitely a possible future if we can't replace cheap oil.

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