GreenMaven offers a ‘green-focused’ search engine that takes advantage of Google’s Custom Search feature that makes it easy for any blog or site to add their own customized search engine. Theirs is a great implementation of this very cool technology.
In my other life as an SEO/SEM guy, I’m very interested in the potential of targeted search that combines Google results with expert editing by actual humans. For those interested in environmental issues, the GreenMaven people have assembled a very useful resource. If you have a greenish blog or site you might want to join them.

BTW, if you’re interested in making a few bucks with your site, Google will share ad revenues from clicks that take place in your custom search engine’s results.

Zowie: 35mpg by 2020. Pitiful to say the least. And yet , the auto lobbyists were apparently caught by surprise when the Senate passed the Energy bill by a large enough margin to defeat a veto. Of course the bill was gutted of practically everything that would make any difference in order to get those votes.
This is another example of the American car companies being so far out of touch that even this wishy=washy bill scares them. By 2020, 100mpg cars will be normal because the market will demand them. The technology is already available.
What’s going on is that Detroit has been making the same inefficient engines for so long that they are now really cheap to build- they amortized the costs of the design and plants years ago and now they cost little more than the materials. To develop new designs and build plants to manufacture them would raise the price and lower the profitability far beyond what they can handle in their present precarious financial state. Meanwhile the Japanese, Koreans and Europeans moved to constant innovation years ago and no longer depend on economies of scale that take years to pay off. Detroit is dead, killed by lack of strategic vision, unions who would cut off their own noses to spite their faces and terrible design.

I have been working on a post about how communities like Rochester need to be aggressively reassessing our mass transit systems from a strategic POV. With gas almost inevitably rising in cost as China’s oil demands increase and supplies and refinery capacities wane, we will be facing a transportation crisis in the next ten years. Our communities have been built based on the ready availability of inexpensive personal transportation. Were I to be forced to take mass transit to buy groceries, for example, I would have to set aside 2-3 hours to complete the task. Many less fortunate in our community already have to do so. Everything is car-distances apart. In many cases we don’t even have sidewalks on main arteries.
While I will still do the strategic mass transit piece (which I hope to publish as an Op-ed in our local paper), today I came across this BusinessWeek slideshow about an urban transit schema that fuses mass and personal transit systems in an innovative and very possible manner. Designed by an MIT team that included noted architect and visionary Frank Gehry, the solution is both elegant and practical. Will it ever happen? I don’t know but it may very well be that market forces will make it so.

The MIT Tech Review covers this new combination of silicon solar technology and targeted mirroring that combines to make practical residential solar panels. As they point out this isn’t rocket science- Soliant utilizes a combination of proven technologies. What it is is usable tech that can be installed by existing installers without a learning curve + a 50% increase in efficiency. Their next generation model promises 88% improvements, bringing their costs below conventional energy sources. Love it.