Maybe I should devote a new category just to Charlie Crist. This guy cannot be doing very well with his own base at this point. The former arch conservative is taking yet another high profile issue and governing like a moderate Democrat. He reversed the decade long trend of trying to disenfranchise blacks and the poor, restoring my own brother’s voting rights in the process. A week ago, he hosted a two day summit on climate change, saying that the state is compelled to take dramatic action to address it, then signing a bunch of executive orders forcing a bunch of groups to reduce green house gas emissions. He’s working with the Democrats in the legislature to try to overcome majority Republican objections to laws that would really tackle this issue. Unlike the voting rights for felons issue, I can see how this issue might help him politically with general election audiences, but it could make him a pariah among the people whose votes and money he may need in a primary three years from now.

Either this guy has undergone a serious change of heart on some major issues over the last few years or he has some serious, clever long term political strategy in mind.

I’ve been wondering for a couple of years why we aren’t seeing diesel hybrids. America is definitely more of a gasoline economy than a diesel one, so I understood why we saw gas hybrids first. With the popularity among the green set of biodiesel, it seemed to me like there might be a stronger than expected demand for hybrid diesels that could be converted or built from scratch to run biodiesel. Diesel is already more fuel efficient than gasoline engines. Combine that with a hybrid, with the new, cleaner diesel or biodiesel, and you’ve got a green star in the auto market. It looks like they may not be too far off, at least in Europe. GM is introducing a 60mpg concept hybrid diesel version of its Opel Astra sedan. A version of the current production Astra is headed to the US later this year as a Saturn. DaimlerCerebrus is working on hybrid diesels both for its Mercedes car and Dodge Ram truck lines.

is threatening migratory birds. Warmer winters, shrinking wetlands, and less predictable weather is making it hard for migratory birds to find sources of food and threatens their population levels.

There’s a new study in the peer reviewed journal Climate Change that is predicting far hotter summers for the eastern U.S. in future decades. Discovery News has a good article that summarizes it. This study is under debate, but the premise behind it is that current models overestimate the number of rainy days we’ll have in the eastern U.S. as the planet warms. Rainy, cloudy days aren’t as hot. More dry days will bring hotter average temps and unbearably hot temps on the really hot days.

This article suggests that we have underestimated the ability of plants and the ocean to soak up carbon. You know that talk about “carbon sinks”? Yeah, not so much. By 2100, the planet could be nearly 3 degrees (F) hotter than most of the predictions we’ve been hearing in recent years.

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting little article on the melting polar ice caps. It looks like we’ve drastically underestimated the rate at which the ice is melting. The polar seas may be navigable in summertime before too long. They may be ice free in the summer by 2050. That stuff is the focus of the article. At the end of it, though, is some info that may explain why the Europeans are so much more serious about cutting back CO2 emissions than the US is. April was the 8th straight month of warmer than usual temperatures in Germany, the 13th in France. April 2006-April 2007 was the warmest 12 months in England in the last 350 years. I’ve seen this even better explained in some temperature maps that I’ve seen online in the last year. The U.S. has certainly had some weird and warm weather at times over the last couple of years, but nothing that’s really out of bounds for us and not nationwide. Based on what Europe has seen over the last couple of years, it’s not unreasonable to think they’re at the beginning of a permanent climate change. While the early phases of that are hot, we have no way of knowing yet how that will play out long term. Climate is so complex and depends on the interplay of so many factors, that it’s hard to predict how things will end up. One theory says that global warming could bring the end or the significant decrease of the Gulf Stream system, ultimately resulting in a colder, dryer UK and western Europe. Whatever the end result, significant climate change in Europe would devastate the region’s agriculture and agribusiness.

I meant to comment a couple of days ago on a Truthout.org column about the top green tech ideas of 2006. I was reminded of that today while reading an article on the upcoming Motor City Auto Show. I’m just going to go ahead and post the most interesting section below:

Plug-In Hybrids and the V2G At the end of 2006, General Motors announced it would commit to manufacturing a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid adds a larger battery pack and a plug to charge the batteries with grid power, allowing the car to rely more on the electric drive and less on the fuel supply. A new study for the Department of Energy has found that we already have enough electrical generating capacity to power 84 percent of our 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrids. That’s because our capacity is designed to meet peak power needs for air conditioning on hot afternoons, and when peak power is not needed there is plenty of spare capacity to charge electric car batteries.

This would be a bad trade-off where grid power is provided by coal. But ask not what grid can do for your car; rather, ask what your car can do for the grid.

The real promise of plug-in hybrids is using their batteries to stabilize a power grid that is supplied by renewable but variable wind and solar power. Dubbed “vehicle to grid,” or V2G for short, the idea is to use the combined storage power of 220 million mobile battery packs to buffer the grid whenever the vehicles are not in use. Vehicles would absorb excess power at night or on sunny or windy days. The vehicle battery packs could then be tapped to help out during peak demand periods and a computerized “smart grid” would regulate it all. The potential is huge. Terry Penney, a technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab said, “if millions of these [plug-in hybrids] were produced, it would enable some of the renewable technologies to really take off.”