Plug in electric cars dramatically reduce carbon emissions — even if they’re plugged in to a dirty coal-fired electric grid. The reason is because electric cars don’t use a combustion engine that runs on oil – the most inefficient and highly polluting sources of energy. Electric cars use a battery and electricity – which is far more efficient so it uses much less power than oil-run car does. So, even if you plug in electric cars to a dirty, coal-operated grid — the impact on the environment is FAR BETTER than using oil. And then the best next step to take is to ‘green the grid’ – that is make our electricity run on renewable energy. That is the focus of my campaign: LetsGreenWashThisCity.org.

A more detailed explanation of all this is on the website: http://www.pluginamerica.com/whyev.shtml – and I recommend the movie: Who Killed the Electric Car.

Take care!

Democrats Vow to Bring the Oil Back Home
Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2007. By Ken Silverstein.

The war in Iraq was never “all about oil,” but the planners of the war obviously factored that Iraq sits atop huge amounts of petroleum into their equations; after all, one of their deeply held ambitions was to open up Iraq’s nationalized energy sector to foreign investment after the fighting stopped. American energy companies held similar ambitions. “Iraq,” said Chevron’s then-CEO Kenneth Derr all the way back in 1998, “possesses huge reserves of oil and gas—reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” Now the Democrats are about to help the Bush Administration and international oil companies achieve that access.

The House will vote as early as today on the Democratic leadership’s $124 billion supplemental appropriations bill. The bill funds the war in Iraq but calls for withdrawal of U.S. troops by September 2008. Democrats are arguing that while they don’t have the votes to actually cut off war funding, by passing the bill they will effectively shut it down 18 months from now.

That’s a dubious proposition given that President Bush has promised to veto the bill if it passes. Meanwhile, about halfway through the 80-page supplemental bill is a section that demands that the Iraqi government enact “a broadly accepted hydro-carbon law that equitably shares oil revenues among all Iraqis” by this fall. That sounds perfectly fine, but the law in question turns out to be one that the Bush Administration and American energy firms have been pushing for years and that, as Antonia Juhasz of Oil Change International explained last week in a New York Times op-ed, would allow international companies to take control of much of Iraq’s oil “for a generation or more,” with no requirements to reinvest earnings in the country. Juhasz noted elsewhere that the Bush Administration dismissed nearly all of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group Report—save for the recommendation that called for the United States to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.”

Congressman Dennis Kucinich has been circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter that asks, so far to no avail, that the call for passage of the oil law be stripped from the measure. “We cannot . . . support this law and continue to claim our actions are in the best interest of the Iraqi people,” he wrote.

Members of the Democratic leadership are still chasing the votes they need to try to pass the bill. If they get the votes, says Kucinich, he’ll seek to offer an amendment to remove the oil law benchmark. But it looks like the House leadership plans to rule Kucinich out of order and not accept any amendments to the bill. “The Democrats say they’re determined to not “let the perfect be the enemy of the good” with this bill,” said Steve Kretzmann, Executive Director of Oil Change International. “But we’re unclear as to how giving the Bush Administration and Big Oil exactly what they want most in Iraq, at the expense of Iraq’s future, can be seen as good.”

We called the action for several reasons. First off, we feel that it’s clearly time for folks to escalate their resistance to the war. Years have dragged on with significant discourse, protests, rallies, polls etc – but we are still in Iraq and our corporate/governmental leaders have been largely able to ignore the growing movement to stop the war. As history has shown – often times for people’s voices to not just be heard but to be acted upon, people must escalate the costs of business as usual. We felt that direct action was the most appropriate tactic at this time, and we fully support the increasing national calls to escalate our resistance to the war.

We also wanted to connect the dots between the true costs of the war in the Iraq and climate change. There is a growing voice that greatest threat to our world is from climate change – and that the money (and lives) being wasted in Iraq (and the “War on Terrorism”) should be spent addressing the serious threat of climate change. There are direct correlations to the causes and actors of climate change and the causes and actors of the War.

We all know that oil resources were a primary factor in the war (and broader economic/political power and control were too, relatedly), but our demand and reliance on oil is no mere accident. We are addicted to oil because corporate interests have historically limited and Corporate profiteers maintain our oil dependence, which furthers their profits, maintains their control of the political landscape, And as we all know – the continued reliance on fossil fuels is a leading cause of accelerating climate change. Not to mention, the US military is the largest single user of fossil fuels, so there is a very direct correlation between oil addiction and war.

And most timely – is the proposed Iraq Oil Law, which basically hands off Iraq oil resources to multinational/US based corporations, with Chevron being one of the primary benefactors of that. It’s not simply that Chevron uses Iraq Oil, but that they have profiteered immensely from the war (not by co-incidence), and have played active roles in shaping policies to make sure they profit while offsetting the costs of their profiteering from war to Iraqi and US citizens and the environment.

No War. No Climate Change.

-Matt

http://www.myspace.com/protestchevron
http://www.nowarnowarming.org/

The best thing we can do to reduce our oil dependency is to demand that our government require car companies to sell electric plug-in cars. The technology has been around for over 100 years, but the oil and car companies have squashed the public from knowing or demanding this. I think there is a huge need for campaigns about this issue. I learned a lot about this issue at http://www.pluginamerica.com/whyev.shtml and they recommend that you contact the California Air and Resource Board to demand these ZERO-emission cars at (800) 242-4450.

The other pragmatic alternative is renewable energy. The technology for this has also been around for decades, and with each year it just gets better. Studies find that most regions can attain 40-50% of their electricity from renewable energy. I’m a member of a group of citizens called Green Guerrillas Against Greenwash that recently formed to demand that San Francisco prioritize Community Choice Energy – with direct actions and a website (LetsGreenWashThisCity.org) – which will move our city to 50% renewable energy.

These alternatives are real and inspiring. For them to be widely implemented – all they need is concerned citizens to step up and demand them from our government.