(Source: TreeHugger)

(Source: TreeHugger)

Photo: Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, president of Argentina, holds a bike while presenting a plan to boost sales of these vehicles. Credit: Argentine presidency press service.

The Argentine government launched yesterday a plan to boost bicycles sales that expects to sell 200 thousand bikes.

Aimed at people with low resources, it will allow them to get a bike for a monthly payment of just 16 pesos, which is about 5 US dollars. In exchange, they will have to turn their old bikes in as part of payment.

Click here to read the full article.

(Source: MCADCAFE)

The EDISON effort (Electric Vehicles in a Distributed and Integrated Market using Sustainable Energy and Open Networks) consists of IBM, Denmark’s largest energy company DONG Energy, the regional energy company of Oestkraft, Technical University of Denmark, Siemens, Eurisco and the Danish Energy Association. Due to the environmental benefits of the electric vehicle technologies, the research will be partly funded by the Danish government.

Market introduction and investment plans in Denmark will result in upwards of 10% of the country’s vehicles being all electric or hybrid electric during the coming years. In order to minimize CO2-emissions linked to electrified transport, global attention on vehicles and infrastructure that will maximize the use of renewable energy for mobility has increased. To achieve this on a large scale, electric vehicles require smart technologies to control charging and billing and to ensure the stability of the overall energy system.

“Denmark, the host of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change conference and the most energy efficient country in the EU, further underscores its ambitions here with the Edison project announcement,” said Guido Bartels, General Manager of IBM’s Global Energy & Utilities industry. “There is already broad consensus that both wind energy and electric vehicles have enormous potential for a sustainable energy future — bringing the two together promises to be a winning combination.”

(Source: Austrian Times)

New research has shown that Austrian drivers cover 194 million kilometres in their cars every day.

The Austrian Traffic Club (VCÖ) reported the figures today (Weds). It added that Austria’s 4.28 million registered cars carried an average of 1.3 occupants each day and emitted 28,000 tonnes of CO2, consuming 11.2 million litres of fuel daily.

VCÖ official Martin Blum reminded the public about the consequences of taking excessively-short car trips.

One in every 10 car trips, he said, covered a distance of less than one kilometre. “Fuel consumption is extremely high over the first kilometre. Consumption over the first kilometre averages the same as consumption of 20-to-25 litres of fuel over 100 kilometres. A breakfast roll obtained by a car trip to a bakery is very expensive,” he added.

Austrian churches are trying to lower the cost of travel by car by encouraging Austrians to engage in less of it during Lent, which begins today.

Austria’s Roman Catholic and Evangelical Churches are calling on Austrians to drive less during Lent, which lasts from 25 February to 11 April this year.

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: Brookings Institution)

(Source: Forbes.com)

California’s HOT expressways are on the rise but need our government’s financial support.

(Source: Irish Times)

IRISH PEOPLE are more concerned about climate change issues than many other countries and they claim to have an extremely high recycling rate, a global survey has found.

The research was commissioned by marketing consultancy Accenture and involved 10,733 consumers in 22 countries including Europe, the US, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia, India, China, Argentina, Chile and South Africa.

Some 87 per cent of Irish people surveyed said they were concerned about climate change, compared with 83 per cent globally. And 96 per cent of Irish respondents claimed to recycle paper or plastic goods compared with 87 per cent globally. Some 93 per cent of Irish people surveyed said they shut down electric devices instead of leaving them on stand-by, compared with 87 per cent globally.

However, Ireland lagged behind in other areas, with 62 per cent saying they would avoid taking the car in favour of using communal transport, compared with 69 per cent globally. Just 21 per cent of Irish respondents said they used alternative energy such as solar or wind power, compared with 28 per cent globally. And 65 per cent of Irish respondents said they avoided buying goods requiring long-distance transportation compared with 71 per cent globally.

(Source: MIT Technology Review)

The chair of the California Air Resources Board has some advice for the new administration.

In 2006, the state of California passed landmark legislation aimed at limiting green-house gas emissions. Under the Bush administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected the state’s request to regulate vehicular emissions. Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced it would reconsider this ruling–most likely in order to reverse it.

Mary D. Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, will be responsible for implementing the state’s climate change legislation. In a speech at the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative annual Energy Symposium yesterday, Nichols had some advice for a new presidential administration with the will to act on climate change: follow California’s lead on energy efficiency because it’s been an economic boon for the state. Nichols mentioned a report by Next 10 that claims cutting energy usage over the past 30 years has created 1.5 million jobs in California. (Still, in a state characterized by suburban sprawl, carbon dioxide emissions are quite high, at 11 tons per capita per year.)

(Source:  Google.org)

RechargeIT is a Google.org initiative that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. We have a demonstration fleet of plug-ins at our headquarters in Mountain View, and we’re collecting and posting data on plug-in performance, investing in innovative technologies, and advocating for the passage of important legislation. Our vision is that one day thousands of cars will be plugging into a greener grid.

We’ve had our RechargeIT plug-ins on the road for about a year now, collecting data when driven by Google employees in our free car-share program. But we wanted to see how they would perform in a controlled test. The results of our seven-week driving experiment are in – and the plug-ins did great, getting as much as 93 MPG average across all trips, and 115 MPG for city trips! See the full results to explore detailed data from the experiment. (And check back often as we’ll be posting even more comprehensive data from our test over the next few weeks.)

RechargeIT Driving Experiment

Electricity usage for plug-in vehicles: 
Ford Escape Plug-In 133.2 Wh/mi, Toyota Prius Plug-in 139.6 Wh/mi

Click here to explore this on-going Google Initiative.

(Source:  Seattle Times)

Remember last spring, when Seattle’s mayor rolled out the city’s first car that could be “filled at the plug instead of the pump?”

It’s called a plug-in hybrid. They are all the green rage — “possibly the most sought-after technological innovation since Captain Kirk first flipped open his communicator,” says The New York Times.

You may have seen the city’s cars around town, painted with an eye-catching claim on the rear bumper: “This plug-in hybrid gets 100+mpg.”

Also, a greener boast: “150+City MPG!”

Not exactly, it turns out. Not even close.

Try 51 miles per gallon, city and highway combined. Not counting the cost of the electricity.

It’s what 14 plug-in Priuses averaged after driving a total of 17,636 miles. The pilot project is one of the few in the nation to subject plug-in hybrid cars to regular motor-pool duty, as opposed to being driven by hypermilers or alt-energy enthusiasts.

Click here to read the entire article.