I’ve been dismayed lately to read about all of the pet-project pork surrounding corn ethanol as a fuel. Congress and the president like it because it’s politically popular in farm states. Automakers like it because on the one hand it doesn’t require any engineering effort, and on the other hand it artificially inflates their CAFE numbers*. And the public likes it because it gives them a warm, fuzzy sense that someone is doing something about global warming and our “oil addiction.”
The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t really do anything, short of raising food prices and “burning the last six inches of midwest topsoil in our cars”: The improvement from a CO2 and energy perspective is somewhere between next-to-nothing and worse-than-nothing. Yet the corn ethanol industry receives bigger subsidies every year.
So the question is how can we curb carbon emissions without encouraging wasteful subsidies for feel-good non-solutions like ethanol and hydrogen? And how can we make it politically possible?
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I’ve been riding the ChargerBike that I appropriated from my dad to work for the last few weeks (at least on sunny days). For the vast majority of you who have never heard of a ChargerBike, it’s an electric-assist bicycle. There’s a 24-pound removable battery pack/controller that sits between the top tube and the down tube, which powers a little motor that has its own chain and freewheel driving the 7-speed hub shifter in parallel to the pedal chain. It’s an electric-assist bike in the truest sense: The motor controller turns on the juice in proportion to how hard you are pedaling. You can set the ratio in a range from half of your pedal effort all the way up to twice your pedal effort.
I’ve also been thinking about how it could be improved. That led me down the following little rathole which I’ll proceed to share with you.
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“I do ride a bike, but it has pedals.”
—Barbara Levy-Cohen, falsely listed as belonging to an “outlaw biker” gang.
I’m just installing my new WordPress blog. A few things I’ve noticed:
- It’s pretty darn slow. I’m not sure if it’s my hosting provider or if I just need to turn on caching.
- The default URL scheme is pretty lousy.
- It’s pretty hackable if you know a thing or two about PHP.
- Ctrl-A doesn’t go to the beginning of the line the way I’d like.
Fortunately, I don’t think any of these misfeatures are deal-killers. I’ll do some hacking and maybe enter a real post or two once I’ve got it looking the way I like it.
