Blogs / Better Planet

The big news over the past week has been the still not completely settled $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. But also noteworthy: the $25 million bailout of the auto industry. It’s not really intended to have any kind of green effect on anything, but it looks like it actually might.

Because it just happens that right now is the moment that GM and Chrysler are in a PR/marketing duel over whose electric car is the Next Prius. Both are coming out with new models in 2010, the Chevy Volt for GM, which is promised to get 100 mpg, and three or four different models from Chrysler (depending on what you count as an electric car), like the Dodge EV, which is supposed to get 150 miles from an electric charge.

Since this is the single greatest area of competition between two of our top three auto makers at the moment, a lot of those 25 billion federal dollars will probably go, indirectly, to the intensive marketing of electric vehicles. The closest thing to a propaganda campaign our government is allowed, in our free-market society, that isn’t an anti-smoking effort.

Image: flickr/Derek Farr

Last night The Colbert Report gave us one of those episodes that pivot in the middle from comedy to that transcendent, swooning, oh-my-god-real-life-is-more-absurd feeling. This took place when GM Chariman Bob Lutz (pictured below) informed Colbert’s fictional persona that 32,000 respected scientists shared his view that climate change is caused by “sunspot activity.”

If you’re done mourning David Foster Wallace, a literary ally of environmentalism, you might consider getting started on mourning Philip Clapp, who spent his career refuting ridiculousness of the Bob Lutz variety. The United States does not have an environmental lobby the same way it has a tobacco lobby, but Clapp’s National Environmental Trust was the closest thing. As its director, he pressured Clinton, Bush, and even Gore, to take serious action on climate change, advocating in vain for the Kyoto treaty. He later moved to the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he lampooned Bush’s weak, late, concession to some form of American involvement in an international treaty on emissions.  Let’s take a moment to remember that environmentalism needs pinstriped Capitol Hill operators with integrity, as well as the rumpled journalists/artists/farmer types.

Image: flickr/Rockershirt 

The first plug-in electric American car, the Chevy Volt, is going on the market in 2010. It doesn’t look like the phallus some gearheads want it to look like (they were into the old car-show model, shown here), and this is causing lamentation in the blogosphere. Pay no attention; this is very good news.

Basically, the Volt can go 40 miles without using any gasoline, and plugs into any old home socket. It takes a few hours to recharge. Only when you’re taking long trips do you need to use gas; the gas motor kicks in after 40 miles and takes you another 300. It uses less electricity a year than a fridge.

The only problem: It’s not really viable as a mass-market business proposition yet. It’ll probably cost about $40,000, and GM doesn’t expect to make a significant profit, even with that hefty price. So while in my wildest dreams it becomes illegal to make any other kind of family car in 2011, that’s not going to happen without destroying the American economy.

Image: flickr/jurvetson

Detroit’s condition is not the kind of thing you want to rub your hands in bloggy schadenfreude over. Blue-collar layoffs have started turning into white-collar layoffs. And when they sell cars that do horrible things to the planet they’re just trying to give the American public what it wants.

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