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.

“It is not real in any language. We are looking for accountable language and numbers. I might be be a rock star, but I can count.”
Bono

He is talking about the G8 announcement on aid for AIDS in Africa, a 25 page document that manages to have no committments whatsoever in it, but he might as well be talking about the Bush global warming ‘initiative’.
These announcements are nothing more than disinformation, stalls and denial campaigns, in other words, carefully crafted lies designed to keep us from actually doing anything. This has become a pattern among politicians of all stripes worldwide. The problem is that we face a worldwide, long term crisis that requires concrete collective action now. And the nationalistic political systems we have in place are simply not up to the task of working on a global scale.
As a capitalist, I think the best hope is that some of the major multi-national businesses realize it is in their interest to deal with this, not waiting for governments to act. This may be driven by profit or the need to protect their markets but it has to happen. Unfortunately the big oil companies are collectively short-sighted from a strategic perspective because they know that nothing can replace the short term cash cow they are riding. Until they come around and stop their lobbying and funding of massive disinformation campaigns, progress will be slow and deadly.
I realize that my statements regarding global corporations will horrify some but I have to ask: Who else is going to lead it? There is a reason why most speculative fiction (near term sci-fi) writers usually project a world run by global conglomerates- they cannot see any other obvious future.

Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe compares NASA chief Michael Griffin’s astoundingly ignorant comments this week to the situation Rachel Carson faced when trying to warn of the long term dangers of DDT back in the 60s. Then it was chemical companies blithely assuring us of the wonders of pesticides. Today it is Bush appointed lackeys undermining the efforts of real scientists.
The pattern here is one that the Bush machine has used effectively since 9/11: Muddy the discussion with misleading statements and proposals that are designed to slow any progress. The recent disruption of G8 talks on cutting emissions by an undefined ‘plan’ announced by Bush is a prime example.