Entrepreneur Watch

Drive a Plug-In Prius, Ford Focus, Toyota Highlander Fuel Cell Hybrid. $10

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area Oct. 9, you have a chance to take an early drive in some green cars not yet on the market.

The Green Drive Expo, billed as an "eco-car event" will feature over a dozen alternative-fuel vehicles with free test drives (the $10 is for admission to the Expo.)

Some vehicles you can drive:

Ford Focus, Think City and Mitsubishi iMiEV all-electric vehicles; Toyota Plug-In Prius; Ford Escape Plug-In Hybrid; Toyota Highlander Fuel Cell Hybrid vehicle; Lincoln MKZ Hybrid; and many more including bicycles and electric scooters.

The event also includes "expert panels" and technology presentations about climate legislation, the future of green cars, updates on alternative fuels.

They'll also show off Tesla Roadsters (no, you can't drive one of those) and some home-built eco-cars.

Hey, it's only ten bucks.

When: Oct. 9 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: Craneway Pavilion

Address: 1414 Harbour Way South, Richmond, CA 94804.

Tickets: $10 for adults; no charge for youths 16 and under. For free passes, go to www.GreenDriveExpo.com. Info: 510-621-7803. 

Do cell phones cause cancer?

Maureen Dowd and Gavin Newsom, both people I respect, think we need to be concerned about radiation from cell phones.

Personally, I'm more worried about radiation from flying saucers. Been thinking about lining my hat with foil.

Dowd harkens back to the time when we didn't know that sun tans and cigarettes were harmful.

Yeah, well, we did as soon as we ran some studies.

There have been many studies on cell phone radiation and cancer. The very few that suggest there may be a link look as authoritative as BP spokesman touting Big Oil's safety record.

Dowd cited "one Swedish study" that showed a 400% increase in brain tumors among people who started using cell phones as teens a decade ago. She doesn't say which Swedes did the study.

Right. How many people were in the study? How many in the control group? And just how many got cancer? Were any of them wearing aluminum foil in their hats?

If you want to see a good summary of studies about cell phone and cancer, check out Environment Health and Safety Online (ehso.org)

My summary of their summary:

Four studies concluded there may be a correlation between cell use and cancer. 

    -- One was done by the World Health Organization, but we have not seen the results of the study yet. Only says it may increase risk. Hostile aliens may land in my back yard, too. But we'll wait for further info.

    -- Another was conducted by an Australian neurosurgeon who reviewed studies others had done and concluded there was "an increasing body of evidence" for a link. But this paper was self-published and was not peer-reviewed, so I'd give it about as much authority as my college paper on Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock." I hated that class.

    -- The third, from the Swedish National Institute for Working Life, concluded that heavy cell phone users had a 3.7 X higher risk of brain tumors. But it was criticized because it required the subjects to recall how heavily they used cell phones a decade ago, at a time when anyone with brain cancer figures the cell phone caused it. The subjects may have been biased. Maybe this was the study Ms. Dowd referred to.

    -- The fourth is another Swedish study. Very specific, this one. People in rural areas who use digital cell phones "may be at greater risk for brain cancer." But the authors admit their study was small and some bigger ones are needed.

Other studies have shown no cancer link. Ehso.com cited five.

    -- the first was done at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, and found that cell phones may protect against Alzheimer's. Wierd. I guess if you use cell phones you'll get cancer, but at least remember that you have it.

    -- Another involving four Scandinavian countries found no increased risk at all. But the researchers say their population study of 16 million people may have been too small to determine a slight increase in risk. 16 million? The study also only covered five years, and it may take longer for cancers to develop.

    -- Tokyo Women's Medical University surveyed 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people and found no correlation between cell use and the cancer.

    -- Scientists in Denmark followed 420,000 cell phone users over 21 years. Again, no correlation.

    -- A four-year British study of 966 people with brain tumors and 1,716 people withpout tumors showed no correlation. 

And finally, a big meta-study involving a bunch of researchers and medical organizations, (the study is here) went through 465 articles, 23 case-control studies, involving 38,000 people to find a link. The conclusion:

"The current study found that there is possible evidence linking mobile phone use to an increased

risk of tumors from a meta-analysis of low-biased case-control studies. Prospective cohort studies

providing a higher level of evidence are needed."

So this isn't exactly comparable to our ignorance of sunbathing and smoking. Lots of studies, inconclusive results, but generally hard to find a link. So choose your own paranoia.

And one other thing should be added: If cell phones are causing cancer, nobody knows why. The radiation they produce is NOT ionizing radiation, which can cause cancer. The radio frequency cells use has never been shown to cause cancer.

My feeling: 

Use a phone headset. Just to be safe. It's easier than the aluminum-foil route.

Send a spine to Congress

I got a notice today from the Post Carbon Institute, which opines on alternative energy issues. The organization thinks President Obama's speech on the Gulf oil spill was a tepid bow to Tea Partiers. 

Clearly, our politicians need to get a backbone. If you believe that oil addiction is something we need to wean ourselves from, the PC Institute will send some spines to congress if you send them a sawbuck.

My opinion is that we're probably stuck with Big Oil for years to come, no matter what. Too entrenched, difficult to replace cost effectively, makes too many billions of dollars for powerful corporations. But until oil drillers can demonstrate that they can deal with disaster, they should be held liable for the billions of dollars of environmental cleanup, habitat restoration, and lost jobs from any spills they cause. Political backbone might help.

Here's the Post Carbon Institute plea for bucks for backbones.

What's it Going to Take to Beat BIG OIL? 537 Spines.

The horrific Gulf oil spill disaster has clearly shown that our nation's leaders need us to show them what it means to have a backbone. So let's do just that - let's send one directly to President Obama, Vice President Biden, and each and every member of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

For every donation of $10 we will send President Obama or a member of Congress a spine with your name on it.

In his oval office address last night on the BP oil spill, President Obama took an important, though long overdue, step in acknowledging that the days of cheap and abundant energy are essentially over.

"For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked‚ not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor."

But the President failed to follow these words with any proposal or plan.

Not since Jimmy Carter has one of our nation's leaders shown the backbone to really take on our addiction to fossil fuels--afraid, perhaps, to suffer the same political fate as Carter--while with each passing day and year we run out of time and resources to avert disaster.

In his recent response to President Obama's speech Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg wrote:

Maybe the Carter Curse is real. Perhaps straight talk about energy is political suicide. But if nobody at least tries - if no one has the courage to make specific proposals that are commensurate with the scale of the challenge that faces us - then the political survival of the current office holder is essentially irrelevant.

Clearly our nation's leaders haven't found the backbone to stand up to Big Oil and break our addiction to fossil fuels, so we're asking you to lend them yours.

Our nation's leaders need 537 backbones. With your help, we'll drop ship a big box of fortitude on Washington D.C.

Along with a toy spine sent in your name, we will also include an optional statement from you, to our leaders, about what you are doing in your life to kick the fossil fuel habit. We'lll be documenting our backbone shipments in pictures and videos that will be uploaded to thePCI Facebook page, so keep an eye out on this campaign's progress.

We need to send 537 spines to Washington D.C. pronto. This means we'lll need help, so please help us spread the word.

For more of my columns on green tech and other issues, please visit my web site.

Google violates Kansas copyrights

Once again, Google has shown its blatant disregard for international copyright standards.

Earlier today, Google CEO Eric "Oh aren't I smart with my Ph.D©" Schmidt announced that the Mountain View, California company was changing its name to Topeka. 

Why? Because the city of Topeka, Kansas had supposedly given up the rights to that name when it announced it was changing its name to Google.

This argument doesn't wash any better than my uncle Ernie after a night drinking with the hoboes in U.N Plaza in San Francisco.©  

Google, sorry, Topeka, knew that the people of Topeka, sorry, Google, were only planning on making the change temporary.

The Topekans, sorry, Googlans, simply wanted to call attention to the fact that children in that city of 122,000 have never had the luxury of Web-surfing faster than 122K baud, 1,000 times slower than that enjoyed by children in more developed parts of the world like Singapore. The good people of Topeka, sorry, Google, Kansas want to convince Google, sorry, Topeka, to install a Singapore-speed© broadband network in its fair city. 

Google, sorry, Topeka, has promised to do that for any U.S. city willing to change its name to Google, sorry, Topeka, wait, I'm confused now. So that city-that-must-not-be-renamed in Kansas obliged, but only for a month.

I know that Google knew this change was temporary because, in another blatant copyright violation in its attempt to destroy mainstream media, Google CEO Eric "Oh, aren't I smart with my Ph.D" Schmidt's announcement actually linked to a CNN article that described Topeka's, sorry, Google's sad attempt to gain Schmidt's attention so that the children of Kansas might catch up to the technology of the "Singapore Age"©. In that article, mayor Bill "No, I don't have a PH.D."© Bunten said it was only for a month.

CNN, of course, is owned by Rupert Murdoch©, who has complained about Google, sorry, oh to hell with it, Google stealing his intellectual property by linking to his news articles. Dr. so-smart Schmidt is just trying to goad Murdoch© into doing something stupid, like blocking his news articles from Google searches. 

When is Google going to learn that EVERY WORD any American ever writes down or steals from a native American tribe is automatically copyrighted and nobody else has ANY rights to it? Just because Topeka is temporarily relinquishing the name, Schmidt cannot violate the city's copyright©. The city has exclusive rights to that name for 123 years past the death of the city's last living resident.

Please, write to your Congressman and ask the Justice Department to crack down on Google before it becomes any more powerful. Before long, it will have a monopoly on every city name in America©.

Let's face it, if this doesn't prove that Google is evil, nothing will. ©

Corn infects beef with e-coli. Do we really need to subsidize it?

    Corn farm subsidies are a relic of the Great Depression. They are an inefficient use of taxpayer money, giving the crop an unnatural advantage over other, more useful, food crops. But political pressure from farm states keep them alive.

    I sympathize with all farmers. It's a tough way to make a living. But why should corn farmers feel they have a government-given right to continue their business? Why do they have more rights than auto workers -- or journalists -- who have seen their industries change and resort to massive layoffs? (As a journalist, I would make a biased but persuasive argument that maintaining a professional press force is more important to the country.)

    Let's add another argument to the list of why corn subsidies are bad. Never mind all the high-fructose corn syrup that has invaded the country, corn's unnatural use in cattle farming is probably causing its own problems. Corn has become the staple diet of cattle used for food. 

    Remember all the e-coli outbreaks that occasionally crop up? Beef is by far the biggest source of these outbreaks. 

    In a recent Charlie Rose interview, Michael Pollan at UC Berkeley and author of books about our food supply, offers a possible explanation for this. Corn.

	The other issue I think though that`s important to touch on is look at 
the system. And there is -- you know, E. Coli 0157H7 is a relatively new 
bug. It was first identified around 1980, `82. 

	And there`s research suggesting that it is one of these bugs that 
evolved on a feed lot, and that it is connected to the way we raise cattle 
at every stage, especially the way we feed them. 

	We give what is for them is a very unnatural diet of lots of corn. 
They are evolved to eat grass. Grass-fed meat at least didn`t used to get 
this kind of bug, and indeed there`s research suggesting that if you change 
their diet to what they`re meant to eat, they shed a lot of this E. Coli 
0157. 

	So it`s if whole system that creates a kind of Petri dish in which 
these new microbes can evolve and then bring this risk into our lives. 

	Industrialized farming and food production is not sustainable. We have to get back to more natural techniques. It will be tough to do without pesticides and other "efficiencies," and political pressure will be enormous. 

    But non-sustainable practices are just that -- unsustainable. They will by necessity end on their own as soil is depleted and land and water is polluted. We would be better off stopping before things get that bad. We should work on ways to make the transition now.

Can we change the weather?

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

-- quote usually attributed to Mark Twain.

We have a hard enough time predicting the weather. Predicting the impact of global warming is even tougher. The question now being increasingly debated is, can we do anything to reverse our own impact on the planet's atmosphere?

We have not had much success reducing carbon emissions, and even if we do, reducing the rate at which we spew carbon into the air may not be sufficient. So can we actually suck carbon out of the atmosphere? 

Possibly, but it's also a scary prospect: Purposely geo-engineering the planet's atmosphere to reverse the accidental geo-engineering we've committed in the past. From a report from the Royal Society in London:

---

Unless future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

are much more successful then they have been so far,

additional action may be required should it become

necessary to cool the Earth this century.

Such action might involve geoengineering, defined as the

deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate

system, in order to moderate global warming.

---

I just hope human folly doesn't make things worse.

Can an electric bus get 100 miles on a charge?

I came across an interesting company recently, Adura Systems in Silicon Valley. The company is designing a bus that it says can get 100 miles on a single charge. More if you make it a hybrid.

It's still in the development stage -- and is hiring engineers, if you're interested. Adura recently closed a bridge financing from New Frontier Renewable Energy LLC, a clean tech fund.

Adura's differentiator is that it's building an electric power-optimized drive train from the ground up rather than adding electronics and batteries to an existing gas-powered design. The idea is to replace mechanical complexity with complex electronics and software - electrical rather than mechanical interfaces between systems. The generator has only one moving part, compared to over 100 for ordinary generators.

Modular battery design.

While Tesla uses a 7,000-cell battery with a 55 KWH charge, Adura uses multiple 22 KWH batteries, fitting up to 10 on a bus. Pull them out to recharge and replace with fresh one. Use fewer batteries of you're going a shorter range (the company also plans to use the design in commercial trucks.) Each "smart" module (batteries, electric generator and motor) can coordinate its power usage with the rest of the system. Load balancing systems pull power from the batteries with the best charge when some start going out, or automatically adjust to more or fewer batteries.

Cheaper?

The problem with most EVs is added cost. Adura management claims their redesign and simpler mechanics makes their vehicles cheaper, anticipating a volume price of $155K compared to $180K to $250K for other electric vehicles. They also say cost of maintenance is reduced to $0.20 per mile, from $1 per mile for other large vehicles.

Why a bus?

The reason Adura is doing buses is because it found a market -- China. The founders started out with the idea of doing trucks (and can still do that) but they were put in touch with the China Automotive Technology and Research Center (CARTARC) the Chinese equivalent of the U.S. Dept of Transportation. 

Adura got an endorsement from CATARC to sell to Chinese bus manufacturers. China wants to clean up its image and show off clean buses to tourists. One manufacturer in Guangzhao is interested and is now sending Adura a bus to prove the concept. Adura will replace the drive train with its own. So far the company just has a small one-person vehicle to prove the concept. I drove it. It's cool.

Will it work?

I don't know. The interest from China is promising, and it has won several kudos and awards. But I've noticed that several of the technical people have left the company recently, such as the former chief architect, Jim Caselaz, who was CTO of a Stanford EV project and Graduate Fellow in Stanford's EE PhD program. And this is still early stage, with a lot to prove.

Adura is headed by Marv Bush, former founding partner at Ovo Technology Partners, a seed stage investor. He was also CTO of Coyote Systems and Translogic Technology, and a former exec with Cadence and Tangent. 

Species extinction

The film "Call of Life," about species extintions caused by humans, was accepted for the Blue Planet Film Festival, running from Sept 4th to Sept 7th in Santa Monica, CA. You can see a short clip here.

The basic theme of the film, says Larz Losness, one of those involved in making the picture: "Earth is in its 6th mass extinction, but this time it is not a meteor or asteroid or a volcanic eruption, it is one rogue mammal causing all the damage.  So this is our responsibility."

In my opinion, any species that could become as successful as humans and spread so widely around the world would cause the same devastation. Invasive species crowd out others, especially when they're so good at altering ecosystems for their own use. Our intelligence made us the only species so successful. So we need to use our intelligence to figure out what we're going to do about it. This film does a great job of laying out the problems and calling for solutions.

The producers have two weeks to raise $29,000. It's worth whatever donation you can make.

Startup Xunlight

Tech Review has an article on Xunlight, a company that's making solar cells on flexible sheets of stainless steel. Says they can fit more easily on irregular rooftops or rolled up and carried in a backpack. To run your radio on those backpacking trips?

Species Extinction

   Call of Life

I attended a screening of a film still in progress called "Call of Life." This is a fascinating film. 

I'm a self-described environmentalist with a science background, and I tend to be hugely skeptical of calls to action. I thought "An Inconvenient Truth" had too many flaws and unsupportable predictions, presenting many things that are still speculation as fact. 

I have absolutely no affiliation with the film or the group that is making it, the Species Alliance. I found it to be well-balanced, with an array of experts, from Sir Richard Leaky to Paul Ehrlich at Stanford. It explores the human relationship with the world around us, how we are encroaching so heavily on the territories of other species, how we affect the environment in so many ways.

You can see a 10-minute preview here. 

This is not a shrill alarmist film. It points out that we are a selfish species, but all species are. The problem is that we have been so successful in almost every niche of the planet that we essentially become an invasive species ourselves. Invasive species affect their new environment, crowding out others. We have the biggest impact of any invasive species, by virtue of our technology and sheer size. We must learn to minimize our impact on the environment around us. It's called sustainable living. By definition, unsustainable living cannot go on forever.

But that does not mean we are immune to extinction ourselves. Steven Jay Gould used to say that, given the fact that there is only one species of human left in the world, we are not a very successful species on an evolutionary scale. Yes, we are incredibly adaptive, but our current habits degrade the environments in which we live. Do we want to adapt to a depleted ecosystem, which might cause a population collapse, or do we want to figure out how to live sustainably?

The film explores the inter-connected relationship of different species of plants and animals to the ecosystem, each a link in the food and nutrient chain that sustains the ecosystem. Take enough links out of the chain and you may cause a crash. Deforestation does that already.

The film includes several alarming statistics -- and they are supportable:

Large ocean fish populations are down 90% since 1950.

The African lion population is down 90% since 1980.

EVERY species of great ape on earth is in danger of extinction.

The current trajectory of human population growth, by contrast, would lead to a 50% increase in our population by 2050, a total of about 9 billion people.

Humans consume 50% of the world's supply of fresh water and 40% of all organic matter produced by photosynthesis.

The solutions to these problems are not easy. We once thought fish could never be depleted from the ocean. We are seeing the populations of many of them collapse, requiring regulations and restrictions on fisheries. Over fishing of sardines in Monterey Bay caused that population to collapse. We're starting to lose the ability to feed ourselves.

The film touches on global warming as one piece of the puzzle. But this is a bigger picture; the many ways we are affecting the planet. We are not separate from "nature." We are part of nature, and are dependant on other parts of it for survival.

Let's face it. Extinctions happen. There have been five major mass extinctions we know of, including the one that caused the disappearance of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The planet lives on. But the life forms it supports undergo radical change. Many die off and new ones replace them. 

This is the first potential mass extinction caused by the ongoing habits of one species. Since many of the species going extinct are the ones we exploit the most -- for food, timber, fuel -- it is not certain that we will come out the other side of a collapse intact. We need to act in enlightened self-interest, if for no other reason.

A great environmentalist I used to take clkasses from, Garrett Hardin, once noted that through technology and life-style changes we can keep increasing the number of humans the planet can support. But there is a limit. As we multiply, other parts of the ecosystme decline. At some point, the ecosystem can no longer support our progress. We cannot get to an infinite population with a dead environment. So, given the fact that there is a limit, it's better to act sooner than later. Life is better with more diversity. What kind of world do we want to live in?

This is an enlightening film. Everyone should see it. The group needs financial support. Contact them at http://www.speciesalliance.org/ to see if there is something you can do to help.