According to SmartPlanet.com, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently called for cities with large numbers of taxis to play a role in cutting emissions. Speaking at a recent C40 conference in Hong Kong, Bloomberg called for the 25 member cities that collectively have oversight of more than a million cabs to consider developing electric taxi fleets. Bloomberg was recently elected chair of the C40 Climate Leadership Group, an association of major cities around the world committed to reducing carbon emissions and slowing climate change.

We’ve seen, I think again and again, how national governments have struggled, both at home and at the international stage, to take climate change actions,” Bloomberg said. “Together, we have to fill the vacuum of leadership ourselves.

According to SmartPlanet, San Francisco is already moving toward electric taxis. Better Place, a California-based electric- vehicle service provider, recently announced a three-year program to establish infrastructure for electric taxis between San Francisco and San Jose.

To collect as many fares as possible, cab drivers prefer to keep their cars moving. So the project entails four battery switch stations, where the EVs would pull into and swap their battery for a fully charged one. According to Better Place, the switch will take less time than a gasoline fill-up.

Last May, a similar project began in Tokyo, home to around 60,000 cabs. Obviously, Better Place would love to land a contract with New York City. But, the cab industry already took Bloomberg to court to fight his older ruling that taxi fleet owners replace their Ford Crown Victorias with hybrids in five years. Last year, a judge ruled in favor of taxi fleet owners and an An appeals Court upheld the decision over the summer.

Undaunted, Bloomberg will continue to push for electric taxis not only in New York, but also in other major cities around the world. His best hope is that major cities will cooperate in bringing the fleets online.

According to Better Place, electric taxis are the gateway to clean cities, because standard taxis are disproportionally responsible for harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Electrification of taxis could make a huge impact on air quality and oil consumption.

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While America debates how to jump-start the “green revolution” touted by people like Thomas Friedman, individual entrepreneurs in other countries are making things happen. A new series in Global Post presents a highly informative and beautifully produced array of video reports on people who are putting ideas into action, and making money from their efforts.

According to Global Post:

As our journalists are uncovering across Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, a radical transformation of the global energy system is well underwayAnd you haven’t seen the half of it.

Each week GlobalPost will be scouring the world for the best green ideas, the most promising renewable energy technologies, and the most successful entrepreneurs now taming sunlight, wind, water, biofuels and the Earth’s own heat to bring clean energy to all people, and to all corners.

This original video series combines two powerful human drivers — greed, and the desire to do good — with fresh ideas and emerging technologies that, taken together, might just save the planet from climate destruction.

The initial offerings include 4-to-6-minute video reports  on:

• A Palestinian in Ramallah “who’s heating and cooling homes in the West
  Bank with geothermal energy”
• A Guatemalan “who’s powering Central American jungle communities with sunlight”
• An entrepreneur in India “who’s burning rice husks to light rural villages”
• An Israeli “who’s using Israel’s abundant supply of magnesium to store solar energy”
• And a Chilean “who’s turning prickly cacti into electricity for the world’s largest copper company”

You can skip the ads that precede the reports, or watch them, if you like. Either way, the reports are well worth watching. I learned a lot, and they raised my hopes for real progress toward clean, efficient energy around the world. And the ideas are explained  in simple enough language to keep me, a non-scientist, coming back for more.  I’m looking forward to following this series. Join me?

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Treehugger reports that in May of this year, Copenhagen made green roofs mandatory on all new buildings with roof slopes of less than 30 degrees. This initiative is part of the city’s plan to become totally carbon neutral by 2025. The new law reflects a growing trend around the world to create green roofs in urban areas. For example, green roofs are already required in the city of Toronto, and their use continues to grow in the US. Chicago has more green roof coverage than any other city, followed by New York, Washington, D.C. and then Vancouver, according to Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a Toronto-based group that advocates for the industry and tracks its growth.

Green roofs provide numerous benefits for buildings and their surroundings. They help to:

• absorb rainfall, reducing stress on storm water systems.
• remove pollutants from storm water
• reduce urban temperatures.
• protect roofs from UV rays and temperature fluctuations
• extend life of roof by up to 200%
• lower heating and cooling costs
• extend life of HVAC systems
• provide sound proofing
• improve air quality

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Recent news:  The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the international space station on May 16, 2010,  after officials decided there would be no need to perform a maneuver to avoid a piece of debris.

This may well have been the last flight of Atlantis. Following this mission it will be kept in working order, to be used as a possible rescue vehicle for one of the few remaining manned space flights.  While risk is still a crucial factor in the manned space program, in some ways, the program appears to be “yesterday’s news.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman has challenged us to launch a green energy technology program to match the intensity of the information technology program that has evolved over the past seventy years.  And he gives us a sound barometer to measure how we’ll know when the energy technology movement is beginning to make a real difference.  It will be when we have failures.  He’s talking about the kind of failures that occurred in the information revolution.  Failure is a reflection of the healthy competition that evolves from Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.

The ashes and rubble of failed programs and companies in the information revolution litter recent history.  But in many cases, each failure represented someone else’s success.

In the 1950s, the Navy’s Vanguard missile program to launch an unmanned satellite suffered one mishap after another, while the Army’s Redstone program succeeded in launching Explorer 1, an eighteen lb. satellite, into space on January 31, 1958, where it remained for twenty-two years.  The Army’s work was the precursor to NASA’s manned-space program.

On the commercial level, we see today’s winners: Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Microsoft, and many others.  Friedman asserts that they stand tall and in many cases continue to battle one another because they won the battles with previous competitors.  Some may remember the Commodore 64, which in the early 1980s was considered the class of the personal computing field.  But its operating system could not keep up with the Macintosh OS and Microsoft’s DOS and then Windows.  Prior to the Commodore, we had  the first personal computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80.  Unfortunately for the company, the computer lived up to its nickname, the TRASH-80.

If you were an investor in the 1980s, you were constantly getting tips on this company or that, one of which was going to revolutionize the computer industry.  The low-price stock might be making memory chips, fiber optics, new welding techniques, or the “brains” to the newest device to swipe credit cards.

While we remember tech stocks as being good investments in the 1980s and 1990s, we forget that most of the losers had investors, and they often lost all of their equity in a failed company.

Friedman’s point is surprisingly simple and logical.  Look at the table below and, while you can’t write on your computer screen, think of  how many information technology companies you could list in the left column and how few green energy technology companies your could list in the right column.

The green energy companies are there, they are just hard to find because they’re not that large (you’re not allowed to count a company called ‘BP’ that wants you to think that its initials stand for ‘Beyond Petroleum’).

Friedman takes the analogy between information and clean energy one step further.   I.T. essentially got its start from government.  During World War II,  the U.S., U.K., Germany, Soviet Union, France, and Italy were all working on hi-tech devices, mainly to become weapons of mass destruction or to be used for espionage.  Following the war, the American and Soviet governments put hundreds of billions of dollars into programs that could only succeed if based on information technology.  First the U.S. worked through the military, then NASA, and by giving tax incentives for research and development as well as building an infrastructure for the internet.

Friedman contends that green energy will become successful when it advances so far that we don’t even use the adjective ‘green’ in front of it, because all energy will be assumed to be green.  This phenomenon will happen when the government makes large financial commitments to partner with private entrepreneurs as it did with the information revolution.  Some of the private companies will succeed and make investors wealthy, and others will go by the wayside and leave some investors holding the bag.  But this is how it worked in our last major revolution and how it has to be if we are going to be successful in going green.

If and when a green revolution succeeds, the corporate corpses may include large fossil-fuel energy companies that currently thrive, as well as start-ups that by design or misfortune just didn’t find a niche in the program.  So if you want to see the clean energy program really take off, look for the failures as well as the successes.

The post In going green, failure leads to success appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Thinking of buying a hybrid? Confused by the slick advertising claims and uncertain about which vehicle will deliver the goods? Help is on the way with the first consumer-centric hybrid-vehicle website created by the respected Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).The Hybrid Scorecard is an independent rating of 31 hybrid models. See for yourself why UCS discovered that “not all hybrids are created equal.”

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