My personal New Year’s resolutions are:

• Complete development of the current phase of FuelClinic.com by February, and have the training module framework completed by April 2009.
• Continue building out my other web-publishing channels
• Eat less carbs and more protein in an effort to manage my own blood-sugar more effectively.
• Take my wife out for a “date night” every two weeks, at least.
• Complete some home-improvement projects like a new closet for the spare bedroom, and shelves for the nook in the “den/office”.
• Train and run two races this year, a 5K in the spring and a 10K in the fall.

What are your resolutions?

Read the rest at: 5 Reasons Why the Economy Might Recover Faster Than You Think in 2009

Meet the E7 - even Batman would like this car. 

Unlike conventional police cruisers, which are retrofitted consumer vehicles such as the Ford Crown Victoria, the E7 is the first car designed and built specifically for law enforcement.

“You would never send a pickup truck to go put out a fire,” Li said. “Why would you send a family sedan to go take care of a homeland-security issue?”

Flashing emergency lights are embedded in the E7’s frame, making the car aerodynamic and visible from all directions. The front seats are designed with extra space to accommodate a police officer’s utility belt…

…Li said the car’s 300 bhp forced-induction 3.0-diesel engine will deliver 420 lb-ft of torque and propel the vehicle from zero to 60 mph in 6.5 seconds, with a governed top speed of 155 mph.

He also said the E7’s engine, which can run on either ultra-low sulfur diesel or biodiesel, will have a combined fuel economy rating of 28 to 30 mpg — up to 40 percent more fuel efficient than conventional police cruisers.

That last point is important when you remember that earlier this year police were cutting patrols, mounting horses, or using bikes to try to control the skyrocketing impact of fuel on the operating budgets.

Watch the video report over at Fox.

Opec has been eagerly trying to recruit Russia to join its efforts and analysts say together the two could announce a further reduction of as much as 3m barrels a day of oil production within the next week.

Chakib Khelil, Algeria’s oil minister and Opec’s president, told state radio on Thursday there was a consensus among Opec members to reduce production when they met in the Algerian seaside town of Oran on December 17. He said: “The Oran meeting will decide a severe production cut to stabilise the oil market.” 

Time will tell if they can woo the worlds consumers back to heavy consumption at the same time they bring prices back to “normal” profitability. If they are successful at turning this train around, then it’s likely the run-up and recovery of recent history were always under OPEC control - then what does it say about their intentions, as America teetered on the brink of the housing investment crisis in an election year…

What do you think?

Usually the Alerts tell me something I already knew - like this new blog post will probably show up later today or tomorrow as an Alert in my email. It’s nice to know that Google notices my hard work.

But my favorite Alerts are those that are not expected, like this one from earlier this week from “Fighting Forclosure” - a blog by Dawn who journals her monthly fight to save (or as she says ”find”) an extra $900 each month in order to cover her mortgage payment after a recent divorce left her with the house.

Google Alerts found Dawn’s recent post when she wrote about using FuelClinic for the past six months, and says it’s helped her understand her fuel usage better. This makes me very happy to hear, and helps inspire me to continue to struggle to build the rest of FuelClinic so that it may be even more useful to her and others. 

At a time where many people are in a similar struggle with their mortgage, Dawn’s honesty, ingenuity, and advice is very inspiring. If you are in a similar situation, I recommend you read her blog. While you are there, you can click on an advertisement or two as well.

No More Chasing Investment (for now)

You may have noticed that development has stalled on new features like the Twitter interface and the training modules. Over the past two months we’ve been actively seeking start-up funding so that we may go full-time in continuing the development of the site. This has taken a tremendous amount of time and effort.

While we’ve received a good deal of very positive feedback, our timing was very poor. The economic downturn since September, coupled with the dramatic drop in fuel prices since November, has made it very difficult to get past the “Gee you have a good idea, come back to talk to us in six months” stage. Overall, it was a very worth-while effort, as continued business-plan development has really helped us find and focus on our core model.

We’re keeping a few investment doors open, but are no longer counting on investment until Summer 2009 at the soonest, and are not actively chasing investment. This means we’ll continue to boot-strap FuelClinic.com development for the foreseeable future, and development of new features (as opposed to seeking funding sources) will again be the focus of our limited resources.

What do you think about $4/gallon gas mandate that Brokaw puts forth? I think Obama had the correct response, but it’s clear that cheap gas literally kills new investment in alternative energy solutions.

OPEC President Chakib Khelil, who is also Algeria’s minister for energy and mines, told the Associated Press that a consensus has emerged among OPEC producers that a “significant reduction” is warranted by the current price slide.

Khelil would not discuss specifically how deep the cut might be. But he used the word “severe,” and noted that some analysts have predicted cuts of as much as two million barrels a day.

OPEC previously announced a 1.5-million-barrel-a-day reduction in October, but the decision failed to halt the fall in prices and markets have been expecting another cut at the Dec. 17 summit.

Why not keep OPEC on the run - regardless the price of oil - conserve as much fuel as possible w/o degrading your standard of living. Use resources like FuelClinic.com ( http://www.fuelclinic.com ) to learn to conserve and track your progress.

Continue to demand alternative sources of energy for your personal transportation. Demand “future-proof” FLEX-FUEL capable cars to take advantage of ethanol and methanol mix fuels w/o expensive new equipment, demand plug-in hybrids that charge overnight using clean electricity, demand small clean diesel engines that can run on bio-diesel that can be produced from algae.

Consumers cut consumption as a result of summers painful fuel costs - and pulled the rug from under OPEC, causing oil to “crash” back down to market value. Keep it going even lower by continuing to curb consumption, and keep pressuring government and industry to bring to market ways we can _replace_ most of oil from our transportation requirements.

Congress should require that new cars run on any mix of gasoline and ethanol and methanol.  As a reminder, in the war on oil-dependence, this would be a game-changer.

The facts:

1) Flex-fuel is an inexpensive, proven technology.
   a. Cost is $100 per vehicle for new cars.
   b. The original flex-fuel vehicle was the Model-T (for 17 years).
   c. The US auto industry currently has over 4.4 million flex-fuel cars on US roads (but few would know it).
   d. Brazil consumes ethanol (from sugar-cane) for over 50% of its fuel requirements.

2) The cost of oil will rise again
   a. OPEC has already cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day.
   b. And is considering an additional cut of more than 2.5 million additional barrels per day (later this week).
   c. Demand for oil from China and India, with vastly growing middle-classes, inevitably will rise again.
   d. The easiest to extract oil on earth has been tapped, and it gets more difficult as time goes on.
   e. Oil is still $30/barrel higher than its 10 year historic low.

3) National-security demands that we reduce our dependence.
   a. Russia, Venezuela, and OPEC are repressive, regressive, and often anti-American oil exporters.
   b. We fund their misbehaviors and we end up supporting terrorism.
   c. We cannot hope to modify the goals of a nuclear-intentioned Iran when we are so dependent and while they control the waterway through which 20% of world’s oil passes daily.

4) Economic strength demands that we reduce our dependence.
   a. We are exporting millions of jobs that could otherwise be producing our fuel domestically.
   b. We could be “recycling” these domestically spend dollars-at a time in which we need it so badly.
   c. We could be developing the technologies that will fuel the future of the energy marketplace globally.

5) Many solutions.
   a. We also need solar, nuclear, wind, and drilling.
   b. But we need Flex-Fuel biofuels NOW as the surest short-term path to addressing our dependecies and to create security and economic strength.
   c. The best time to get the auto-makers to cooperate is while they need a “bailout”.

6) Please, contact your Senator today–not tomorrow.
   a. Call (202) 224-3121 and ask to be transferred to your Senator’s office.
   b. You can make a difference with just a phone call.
   c. Call both of your Senators.
 

Reprinted w/ Permission from MoveBeyondOil.org
E-mail: info@movebeyondoil.org
Phone: 516-717-0000

It was just 4 short months ago that the gasoline seemed destined for $5+/gal, and the cost of a barrel of oil was sure to climb to over $200/bbl. American consumers are enjoying “cheap gas” again, and some are already questioning the painful lessons of the summer. (For the record, gas prices are still twice as high as ten years ago when a gallon of gas cost you right around $1/gal)

Here are my thoughts:

1. This too shall pass. Oil prices will not remain low for very long unless there is a major shift in the way our transportation sector is powered.  Our dependency on oil is still nearly absolute, and there are major forces already acting to raise the price of oil.

   1. OPEC is cutting production by millions of barrels per day. In the past these kinds of cuts were successfully used to raise the price of oil world-wide. (I say “in the past”, read below…)

   2. Focusing too closely on the cost of fuel at the pumps today or in recent weeks ignores the inherent weaknesses in the capacity of our existing production, pipeline, refining and distribution systems. If consumers return to unbridled consumption, there is stil not enough capacity to meet that demand.

   3. Security experts have warned that one successful attack on major oil infrastructure can still have catastrophic effects on supply, which will immediately drive the costs to record highs.

2. Improving fuel-efficiency appeals to a diverse group of people; including the penny-pinchers, environmentalists, and the national security hawks. The low cost of oil actually worries two out of the three, and the third is still feeling compelled to save.

   1. Environmentalists fear that cheap gas acts as a green-light to consumers to continue to buy gas-guzzling and CO2 belching SUV’s they don’t really need, and to slip back and continue wasteful consumption.

   2. National security hawks understand that the market is fragile and is still run by countries and organizations that openly wish to do us harm. Low-oil prices do hurt the war-chests of some state sponsors of terrorism and radicalized Islam, but these same players have enjoyed several years of record profits and have amassed enough fortune that they can wait-out any temporary drop in oil prices. We only reach security goals by replacing oil-based fuels with alternative sources of fuel and energy.

   3. And still the penny-pinchers need to save money. The economic trouble that exists alongside the cheap oil prices means that money is still tight, in spite of cheaper fuel.

3. The real damage to our economy is not yet realized, and we’ll need to continue to conserve and produce alternative sources of energy just to survive.

Personally, I think that the oil cartel has overplayed their hand. I think world-wide consumer confidence is shattered, and there will be a period of suffering for oil producers as the rest of the world works to replace them.

I think more than anything, last summers outrageous jump in fuel costs was an education for Americans, that our system truly is out of control, and that it’s not sustainable. It was an expensive education, to be sure, but one that may pay dividends as we continue to conserve as we develop and implement replacement technologies and fuels to ween ourselves off the oil tit.

By Peter Forman
Published: November 14, 2008
New York–This is a Breaking News analysis as of Friday, Nov 14, 2008, 5:30 pm.

The United States continues to “perpetuate” a broken auto industry.

Because of pressure from Detroit, unions, and Michigan lawmakers, the “Big Three” auto makers have been insulated from the real market-place of competition for the past 30 years. The Japanese and Germans have figured out how to build cars in the American South profitably–but not the Big Three.
 
Looking at this from a Darwinian perspective, the US auto makers were protected from the same marketplace pressures to which the world’s other car makers were exposed.  The extra profits they were able to generate by virtue of this protection essentially went to the workers and to shareholders.

That’s fine and good except now we have a completely broken auto industry that is unable to compete.  Now exposed to declining demand and lacking access to “cheap” capital, they are likely to disappear in their current forms–even after we spend untold billions in short-term assistance.
 
For years they fought everything from seatbelts to higher mileage standards to bio-fuels.  The unions and the companies are victims of their own self-inflicted damage. 
 
Now there is breaking news that President Bush, later this afternoon, has called on Congress to give U.S. auto makers quick access to a $25 billion federal loan program by dropping a requirement that the money be spent on converting to fuel-efficient vehicles. (emphasis mine) 

The move, aimed at ending what the White House called partisan “gridlock,” represents a significant escalation in the political battle over aid to the Big Three auto makers.  This is ahead of an expected showdown next week in Congress between Democrats and Republicans.
 
We taxpayers, the investors-of-last-resort, should at least expect that these bail-out monies be invested in a way that prepares the car companies for the future and that serve our national-security and economic interests. It is the very least we can demand and expect. 

While we are unlikely to ever see a return of these funds, the car companies could at least agree to manufacture all cars beginning in 2012 with flex-fuel compatibility and continues progress towards EVs (electric vehicles).

Without at least those commitments, what will we have to show for this “investment”?

Demand that your Congressperson and Senator act–call today!
Demand loans only in exchange for the Open Fuel Standard Act.
Demand that, for once, we begin to move beyond oil.
 
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Used w/ Permission: MoveBeyondOil.org