Vehicle Energy Solutions
Story by Tom Andersen
Email Tom: ([email protected])
June;
Here is my idea for the solution to vehicle carbon emissions:
For less money than the proposed bailout, the government should buy the big three US automakers. It should replace existing management with that of Tesla, the San Carlos company developing electric cars, and develop an electric cars & light trucks with quick change battery packs, like cordless drills, only bigger. The cities of San Francisco, San Jose & Oakland recently reached agreement for electric battery stations for vehicles. The fed should mandate that nationally. Stations with solar arrays could maintain a stock of recharged batteries for exchange, for a fee, those batteries having been recharged by solar & wind power. Bays with hydraulic lifts could be set up where a car would pull in, and a tech would drop the battery and replace it with a fully charged battery.
Additionally, a cap & trade system for vehicles should be implemented modeled on that proposed for carbon emitting buildings etc. A national milage standard should be set, perhaps 50mpg. Vehicles would be required to have an annual odomoeter reading. If they got less than 50 mpg, they would pay a fee, say a penny a mile for every mile per gallon under 50, so if a car got 40mpg, and drove 15,000 miles, they would pay a fee of $1500. Cars exceeding the standard, they would get a payment using the same formula, so if a car got 60mpg and drove 12,000 miles, the owner would get a payment of $1200.
Initially, the payments would be funded by collections, as most vehicles would be under the standard. As electric vehicle production came into full force, eventually there would be more payouts than collections. At this point, the payouts should be funded by a gas tax, further making fossil fuel vehicles more expensive to operate, thereby creating a financial incentive to go to electric vehicles.
—————-
Tom says he’s encourage by President Elect Obama’s nomination of physicist Steven Chu as energy chief. To read more about the pick, please click here
Here are some photos of my latest trip to Nome in Joe’s 180 Cessna. We were looking for a wrecked P-38 World War II fighter which crashed 50 years ago about 100 miles east of Nome.
Nome is 5 1/2 hours in the 180 and my description of Nome is ‘5 blocks wide and 12 blocks long’ and that’s just about it.
We located the wreck from the air and marked it on the GPS, and the only way to get there (a chopper was $350 an hour) was on a quad.
I got stuck 20 to 25 times. Joe only got stuck a dozen times.
I wish I could have taken more photos however. We didn’t get back to Nome until 2:30am. A long day…………started at 6am.
We crossed back and forth on the river for 30 miles down and 30 miles back. Got stranded in the middle once……….it killed both the quads……….that was about 9pm.
We got close to the wreck but kept getting the quads stuck in the tundra, what a bitch and it was getting late so we had to split.
But, it was a hell of a trip.
Then on the way home in the 180 we got hammered by severe turbulence going through Rainy Pass crossing the Alaska Range. We got the shit kicked out of us. I was amazed the wings weren’t ripped of the plane. That lasted almost 45 minutes.
The few clusters of Americans scattered in the bureaucratically named Department of California felt threatened on the brink of the U.S. war with Mexico in 1846. The settlers smelled invasion in the air. But from whom? They weren’t certain. They feared the Indians who could set fire to their homes and crops; they feared the Mexicans who could take away their livelihood, but for a time these isolated Americans whipped themselves into a frenzy against their old enemy England.
And why not fear England? At that very moment Admiral Seymour of the British Fleet was rumored to be sailing for the Pacific Coast. The settlers wondered if his orders were to take California. The editors of English publications supported the efforts of any country but America in a California takeover. The nerves of Americans were not soothed by the fact that until 1846 England and the U.S. jointly held Oregon.
However, the English decided that Cailfornia was not a plum worth fighting over; or else, as Josiah Royce, author of California, published in 1888, suggests, the British agents were not ready when the time came to strike. After all, it was the United States that went to war with Mexico and won handily in 1848.
Josiah Parker Ames was an Englishman who did not alarm the settlers when he appeared in Half Moon Bay about 1858. Born in England, but reared in New York City, Ames was 20 when he joined Colonel Jonathan Stevenson’s special regiment that sailed around Cape Horn to Califonria in 1847. The colonel’s instructions were to take part in the American occupation and to make the inhabitants “feel that we come as deliverers.” With the completion of the mission, Colonel Stevenson bought a rancho in Contra Costa County. His objective was to turn the land into a large, prosperous city. Josiah Ames followed in the colonel’s footsteps when he cast his eye on Half Moon Bay.
Already Ames had tasted the life of tents and cloth houses in San Francisco and the rawness of life in the gold mines. Filled with energy, he was now ready to buy land, start up businesses, and launch a political career.
Perhaps fellow “Regiment” member James Denniston invited him to the Coastside; they were close friends. After marrying into the Guerrero family, Denniston found himself the wealthy owner of an immense tract of land, called El Corral de Tierra, stretching from Montara to the Arroyo del Medio in Miramar. The creek running through the property in Princeton, where the family resided in an adobe, was named Denniston Creek. He operated Old Landing, where little steamers stopped to load produce in the 1850s.
Jim Denniston was politically powrful. During a trial in which he was the defendant, the jury did not bother to rise from their seats to deliberate elsewhere. They acquitted him on the spot.
While living in Half Moon Bay, Josiah Ames found romance. In 1861 he wed Elizabeth Freeman at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in San Francisco. The happy couple lived in a new 12-room house with ocean views. The San Mateo Times & Gazette gave the house the nod: “It is decidedly the finest dwelling on the other side of the mountain.”
Already a county supervisor, Ames now took office as county treasurer.
Josiah Ames was involved in much of Half Moon Bay’s miniscule economy. In 1873 when seven hundred citizens lived in Half Moon Bay, the flour mill he owned turned out 50 barrels of flour per day. He supplied the town with water. He was the proprietor of the Half Moon Bay Liversy Stable at Kelly and Main Streets.
“J. P. Ames has selected and stocked one of the best equine establshments on the coast,” boasted the Gazette. Perhaps he rented horses for the Fourth of July races at the Half Moon Bay Trotting Track. But there were hard times, too: In 1869 Ames’ good friend, 45-year-old Jim Denniston died of Bright’s Disease. Ames’ wife died in 1871.
His most significant contribution was the building of a wharf and warehouse at the mouth of the Arroyo del Medio Creek in 1868. By this time Denniston’s “Old Landing” had slipped into serious disrepair, and the new wharf, called Amesport Landing, opened up a vital economic link with the outside world.
Ameport prospered in the 1870s. It seemed that San Franciscans could not buy enough Half Moon Bay potatoes. In 1874 the Monterey sailed off with six thousand sacks full. “This is almost like shipping coals to Newcastle,” remarked an amused newspaper correspondent.
The political star of J.P. Ames was rising when he donated a new flag staff to Half Moon Bay in 1876. The local paper described it as “a beautiful stick, with a small platform around the base.” The flagpole was planted on the southwest corner of Main and Kelly Streets.
While Ames reached new political heights as a state legislator, the booming potato business at Amesport fell into decline. A pesty worm had destroyed the crop, including future plantings. The little steamers started to bypass Amesport and finally Ames sold the wharf business to the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. But they were never able to duplicate the heady days of the 1870s.
The connection between Josiah P. Ames and Half Moon Bay was severed. He left the Coastside and was appointed the Warden of San Quentin Prision. He was 76 when he died in Martinez in 1903.
—————
—————-
[Image: Mildred Brooke Hoover, author of Historic Spots in California, 1932. The Hoovers, Mildred and Theodore, lived south of Pescadero at Rancho del Oso. Theodore Hoover headed up Stanford’s Engineering Dept. The Hoovers were well liked in Pescadero, often inviting the locals to dinner.]
From Mildred B. Hoover’s book, page 328.
Amesport
A wharf erected in 1867 by Ames, Byrnes and Harlow on the ocean side of the county called Amesport Landing. It was located near the mouth of Arroyo Medio, a small stream dividing the properyof the two owners of Rancho Corral de Tierra. Warehouses used for the shipping of grain from this fertile region were built just south of the creek.
J.P. Ames, the leader in the activity, was a native of England who had lived east of the Missippi for some time before starting west as a member of Stephenson’s Regiment. The men of this regiment had been chosen for qualities that would serve them well in pioneer settlement after military duties should be ended. Ames was dishonorably discharged at Monterey in 1848, and coming to this vicinity in 1856, became county treasurer in 1862. He was appointted by Gov Booth to settle the Yosemite claims and was a member of the state legislature in 1876-77.
Amesport Landing was afterward acquired by the Pacific Steamship Company, which disposed in 1917 of the site of the old warehouses to the present owner of a small hotel erected there. The settlement is now called Miramar, where the weather-beaten piles of an old wharf may be seen near the hotel.
You don’t have to live on historic Johnston Street in Half Moon Bay – or be born into one of the pioneer families – to fall in love with the fascinating history of San Mateo County’s oldest town.
Johnston Street, east of the colorful shops on Main Street, presents a seductive introduction to the charms of old Half Moon Bay, a close-knit village known as “Spanishtown” over 100 years ago.
History is inescapable on Johnston Street. In brief, at 505 Johnston Street, the Spanishtown Historical Society operates a quaint museum in what was formerly the town’s two-cell jailhouse. Behind the museum you’ll find the “Thomas Johnston Barn,” filled with antique agricultural implements that help tell the story of farming on the Coastside.
A few paces to the south stands the strikingly beautiful Methodist-Episcopal Church built in 1872 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
While Johnston Street was where old Half Moon Bay’s political and business elite chose to live, their homes were not the fairy tale castles we associate with the rich and powerful from “over the hill” in Burlingame and Hillsborough.
In case you’re wondering how Johnston Street found its name, here’s a brief history of that pioneer family. Born in Scotland in 1813, James Johnston came to America as a child. During the Gold Rush he acquired 1, 162 acres from the Miramontes family, land close to the village now known as Half Moon Bay. At the time the Spanish called it “San Benito,” but to the Yankees it was “Spanishtown.”
James built the interesting New England-style “saltbox farmhouse” on a slope overlooking the romantic Pacific for his Spanish bride, Petra Maria de Jara. On the second floor there was a small chapel, and the walled garden and separate cookhouse are said to reflect the influence of Johnston’s wife.
When it was new, the house was painted white. Known as the “White House,” it became the center of social and cultural activities of the day. James and Petra came to symbolize the successful melding of the Yankee and Spanish communities.
James Johnston stocked his ranch with dairy cattle driven west from Ohio by his brothers Thomas and William. Thomas Johnston operated a fast freight business out of the restored barn now directly behind the Spanishtown Historical Society’s museum.
Mozart and I have been spending two or three hours together every day for the past two months. Sometimes I grumble at these meetings. I have been known to swear. But I have never failed to show up, and I am never bored. I love Mozart more now than I did when I knew him less intimately.
On Saturday, Feb. 7, I am supposed to play the solo part in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, Köchel 467, with the Coastside Community Orchestra in their winter concert at the Community Methodist Church in Half Moon Bay. My part is about 50 pages long and takes about 25 minutes to play if you don’t stop.
Although I have been getting paid for playing the piano since I was 13 and had my first church job, I have never played anything as long, as exposed, or as difficult as a Mozart piano concerto. I got the job when the orchestra decided it wanted to do a piano concerto and two likely soloists politely declined to perform without pay. I am the orchestra’s regular pianist; it is a volunteer orchestra, and if they ask me to play, I have to do it. Usually I enjoy it.
In this case, my confidence was not boosted by the reaction of two musician friends when I told them about the concerto. “What? WHAT?” one of them said. “Oh, dear!” another one said. That made me mad, so I practiced so long and so hard that I worked myself into a disastrous muscle spasm and had to go to the doctor.
You may know Mozart from the film “Amadeus”, which was a singular allegory about the nature of musical genius but which wasn’t very true to history. In February, 1785, when Concerto 21 was written, Mozart was married to the dippy Constanze, whom he adored, and had a year-old son, Karl Thomas, one of his two surviving children. He had presented six string quartets to Joseph Haydn, who considered Mozart the greatest composer he had ever known. He was short of money as always, though he lived well and had a special affection for gold buttons on his jackets. He was 29 years old and had only six more years to live.
As one studies a major work like the piano concerto, things begin to reveal themselves which are not obvious from listening to recordings, or even from playing through the work the first dozen times. My first realization, of course, was that when you are mad, scared, or unconfident, it is difficult if not impossible to play Mozart.
The second and happier realization was that this particular concerto is truly play…as in play the piano, not work the piano. The conversation between the orchestra and the solo instrument is so lighthearted and joyful that the player cannot help but join the party.
Lesson three: You cannot read music when you are crying. The slow movement of this piano concerto, which is sometimes called the “Elvira Madigan” because it was used in an old Swedish movie of that name, pulls at the heartstrings, and it does it every time. Fish up a performance of the Andante on YouTube or iTunes and see if it doesn’t get you.
The entire work is like a little opera, but to tell you more would be against the whole premise of classical music, where you get to create your own plot as you like. I can only say that Mozart, who could sometimes be coarse or unkind in his everyday life, is angelic in his music; in this, the film “Amadeus” was absolutely true.
Who could fail to love someone who saw and wrote so convincingly about a finer, brighter world than the one we live in? It is more than 200 years since Mozart walked the earth, but the power of his vision has remained undimmed. What a privilege to get to play one of his major works. I hope I don’t make too many mistakes.
I am glad to announce that the 3rd issue of mgv2>datura is now online featuring:
Daniel Y. Harris – David Fraser – Alex Galper – Taylor Graham – Steven F. Klepetar – Chris Major – Srinjay Chakravarti – Tendai R Mwanaka – Jan Oskar Hansen – Cover ans inside illustrations: Norman Olson
You can read this new issue at mgversion2.free.fr in the B-side, Current issue
