Electric cars are here, *now*

Forget the future, electric cars are here, right now:

http://www.tesla.com/

Also check out this organization that promotes the adoption of electric vehicles:
http://www.pluginamerica.com/

They will make private showings of Who Killed The Electric Car available to student and other groups.

I saw that documentary and it blew me away.

Electric cars can run, right now, with a range of about 300 miles and a top speed in excess of 80 mph. It takes 50 electric cars to make the same pollution as one gas powered car. Since electric cars have no transmission ( fewer moving parts ) they can be maintained for only a fraction of the cost of a conventional car. Electric cars only use 25% of the electricity that hydrogen fuel cell cars would. That electricity would come from dirty fossil fuel plants.

Electric car technology exists right now. Hydrogen fuel cell technology is decades away and requires “5 technological miracles” as the documentary put it.

Watch this cool trailer of Who Killed The Electric Car and encourage everyone you can to rent a copy of the film:

“The Secrect”

First, let me write that I am a firm believer in the power of visualization. I’ve read that it can have effects on your body and I believe it can help people to mentally prepare themselves to achieve their goals.

However, there is a tired ages old recycled idea going around now under a new coat of paint, a new name, called “The Secret”.

In a nutshell, it is the idea that your thoughts create your reality, literally. That is, your thoughts will act directly on reality. If you believe in a red bicycle being yours hard enough, it will appear in your life.

I guess I can’t be too critical, because when I was a teenager I was heavily into Jane Robert’s “Seth” series of books, which pretty much said the same thing. If you believe something, it will be so.

I am disgusted with the hucksters for recycling this very old bogus idea and exploiting people with it. It is right up there the no money down real estate scams and people who have no other talents selling their services as personal development coaches.

I am also disgusted with otherwise intelligent people ignoring their intelligence so they can indulge themselves by believing what they want to hear.

A few months back I read a web board run by a self improvement expert who went full hilt on “The Secrect”, “intention manifestation”, and “the law of attraction”. Before I quit the site I read an amusing post by a young disgruntled 20 something student.

He complained that he bought a copy of the movie “The Secrect”, far too many ancillary books on the subject, and threw himself into visualizing what he wanted for several months only to get no results ( surprise! ). He still had trouble paying his rent, his grades sucked, he put on weight, and he still did not have a girlfriend.

The self improvement expert who owned the forum quickly chimed in on the thread informing the student that he had made a terrible mistake in misinterpreting “The Secrect”. The self improvement expert said that visualizations and changing your beliefs was not enough. A person also had to do concrete work toward achieving his/her goals. You know, good old fashioned efforts like getting a job, studying, working out and making an effort to meet people.

Work? Effort?

There used to be a fad diet called “The Grapefruit Diet”. By eating lots of grapefruit you would get some magical chemical which would help you lose fat. When I was a teenager I walked into a GNC in my local mall and bought a bottle of grapefruit pills. The pills came with a little booklet. In the booklet was a two week menu of reasonable foods, in reasonable portions. The booklet stated that in order to maximize the results of the grapefruit pills that the consumer should use the pills with the diet in the booklet and do regular exercise.

I see “The Secret” as being a bottle of grapefruit pills.

Smug Alert

I replaced all of my incandescent light bulbs in my apartment with compact fluorescent light bulbs. I never did this before because I heard they were outrageously expensive. Not anymore. I went to Home Depot and bought a pack of four 60 “watt” equivalent bulbs for just $7.70. I also got some 100 “watt” equivalent bulbs for about $3 each.

They are guaranteed for 10 years of usage…..you read that right…..10 years ( no more getting up on the step ladder ) and they use 1/4 the power of incandescent bulbs. I am told they will make a noticeable difference in my electric bills and will pay for themselves.

I am also told that if more Americans used compact fluorescent light bulbs, it could reduce air pollution enough to make a noticeable, positive effect on global warming. Australia and the European Union both passed laws recently to make incandescent bulbs illegal in a few years.

Though the bulbs contain small amounts of the toxin mercury, they have the potential to reduce, dramatically, the amount of mercury in our air. Many older coal fired power plants do not have to install pollution scrubbers, because of a loop hole in a law that states these plants do not have to install scrubbers until they spend past a certain amount of money on maintenance in a given year. So, these companies never spend beyond that amount. They are free to keep belching toxic mercury into our air.

Maybe some young environmentalists out there can look up this law and post it on the web in a friendly format for people to learn about. That might create enough pressure to get those loop holes changed and the mercury out of our air.

In the meantime , by reducing the power for our lighting by 75% – which these bulbs do – we can cut those mercury emissions by reducing our demands on those older coal fired powered plants. It doesn’t matter where you live and what kind of power plants are close to you, all of the electricity generated by the power companies goes into a common pool for distribution called “the grid”. You really can’t be sure of where you electricity comes from in most cases.

Because compact fluorescent light bulbs do contain mercury, please do not throw them out. Call your township or read lamprecycle.org to find out how to dispose of them.

These things are so cool!