Dingell's trying to address global warming....this gives me hope

Dingell is a extremely powerful, canny, astute politician. I'm often annoyed at his policies but I give him the credit for much of the large environmental bills passed in the last few decades. If he's finally on board with dealing with this crisis then I'm close to believing we will address this crisis.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1627016-1,00.html

An Auto Insider Takes on Climate Change

There are millions of reasons to think Congress won't do much about global warming, all stockpiled in the lobbying budgets of the U.S.'s mightiest interest groups--automakers and other manufacturers, environmentalists, labor unions, farmers, oil companies, coal companies, utilities, the military, antitaxers and so on. A Washington axiom holds that it's always easier to do nothing than to do something. By that standard, tackling climate change, which would affect every industry and every private life, looks almost impossible.

On the other hand, there's John Dingell. Michigan's eternal Congressman, defender of Detroit's carbon-spewing gas hogs, would seem an unlikely cause for optimism. After all, his wife Deborah is a General Motors Foundation trustee, leading his critics to assert that Dingell is literally in bed with the auto industry.

But just as it took anticommunist Richard Nixon to open the door to China, and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons to denounce misogyny in rap, so Dingell, Democrat from Dearborn and friend of factories, may be the insider able to drive change. At 80, restored to his wide-ranging dominion over the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, "John Dingell is one of the few people with the capacity to manage complex pieces of legislation where there are high stakes," says former House colleague Philip Sharp.

He's smart enough, strong enough, mean enough. Sharp saw Dingell up close the last time Big John reluctantly tackled air pollution--the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act that successfully dealt with acid rain. Now Dingell has awakened to global warming, holding more than two dozen hearings on the issue since February and extracting on-the-record promises of cooperation from heads of industry more accustomed to obstruction.

If true, good on her. If it helped, good on him...and the industry.

effective global warming policies. If he just wants to spite Pelosi, I don't care as long as he works towards a solution.

we should consider how to reward alternative fuels and
particularly electric and plug in vehicles.

One way is to move ahead on changing regulatory structure
and updating equipment for
utilities, to allow electric car owners who plug their vehicles
in to get paid for providing power storage and load balancing
services for utilities.
Some well placed observers say this could mean direct payments to
Battery electric car owners of 2 to 4 thousand dollars per year.

http://www.calcars.org/faq.html#1

What's Vehicle-to-Grid and why would I like it?
Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) is the concept of using stored energy in a plug-in hybrid's (or electric car's) battery to send power to the electrical grid when necessary. When plugged in, hybrids with advanced controllers can announce their identity, location and storage capacity to the grid. The utility can then juggle small amounts of power back and forth to the cars' battery packs, helping the utility level its power from moment-to-moment, providing voltage regulation, spinning reserves and other functions. And if adopted on a widespread basis, V2G can help during peak loads -- in the middle of the day when energy demand is highest, usage of car energy can prevent utilities from turning on high-polluting "peaker" plants.

Studies estimate utilities might compensate car owners with $2,000-3,000 a year to "borrow" their storage capacity -- thereby helping to offset the incremental costs of plug-in hybrids. For more on plug-in hybrids and V2G, see CalCars Resources, University of Delaware V2G Research Center, and papers from a June 2005 conference in Seattle.