Infiniti's "G" sedan can be traced back to the Skyline, introduced by Japan's Prince Motor Company in 1957. The Prince Skyline was a luxury car whose 1.5L, 60HP engine could get it to speeds up to 140kph (87 mph).
The sleek lines of the G / Skyline are preserved in all its manifestations as a sedan, a coupé and a convertible; there is a crossover version as well (called the EX in the US).
I didn't see the Super Bowl. So I didn't get to see all the drama that was the game, nor all the drama in the commercials that sponsors have placed in the game at stratospheric cost. Since we don't have TV, I will also mercifully be spared the endless re-runs of all those commercials.
But I do find commercials fascinating: the ad men have spent astounding amounts of resources to figure out our buttons, so that they can push them and make us do their bidding, even while making us think that buying this or that is all our own idea. Free choice, and all that, you know? The marketing machine is frighteningly effective, endlessly fascinating, and never to be underestimated. When we are traveling I make a point of turning on the hotel TV with the express purpose of checking out the ads. Because they offer a glimpse into the nation's psyche.
So after the game I went to the Superbowl Commercials site, where you can enjoy all the game ads without being distracted by the game itself. When you see the ads all in a row, a few themes emerge.
A while ago, I looked into the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car, and found the GREET model (short for "Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation"), a lifecycle analysis developed by a team at Argonne National Lab.
That lifecycle model is process based, that is, they look at all the components of a car and ask how much energy it takes to make the steel frame (counted all the way back to the energy required to mine the iron and/or recycle the steel from scrapped cars), the glass windows, the plastic parts, the aluminum engine, the various fluids (except the gasoline) the electrical wiring with insulation - the works. This estimate is a huge undertaking.For a "vanilla" car weighing 3330 lbs (think a Honda Accord sedan), they arrive at 8.5 tonnes CO2 for the Vehicle-cycle Energy. That's 8500 kg or about 18,800 lbs of carbon dioxide (or CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas).
You deposit your delicate derrière onto the driver seat and you:
(a) Run back into the house and don't emerge until May.
(b) Grit your teeth, remain seated and get frostbite on your bum.
(c) Turn on the seat heat and drive away. - OR:
(d) Settle yourself in comfort and calmly drive away.
I have a friend who goes for option (a), spending winters holed up in her house until she runs out of food. As she telecommutes, she really only needs to emerge to walk her dog a few times a day: since it doesn't involve putting her behind in contact with any cold objects, she can deal with that.
But a mom like me doesn't have that option. There's school, sports, fossil hunting. There's grocery shopping and cello lessons. I have to take that driver's seat.
In South Korea, the Chevy is available in either sedan or hatchback, called the Cruze5 (for five-door vehicle, presumably). In Great Britain the Cruze is also available in those options, called Saloon and Hatchback, with a Station Wagon to arrive later this year.
I've been thinking about Chinese moms: the ones living in large cities, who have recently had to cope with their families living inside a thick pall of smog. Megacities don't have the cleanest air in the best of times, and for places like Beijing these are not the best of times.
Smog contains many gaseous chemicals that are bad for you, but the most worrisome part of the pollution are the small particles (soot and aggregates) that can penetrate deeply into the lungs and cause breathing problems, exacerbate asthma, and even lead to lung cancer. The smallest particles, the ones that cause the most trouble, are those of a size 2.5 micrometers (µm) or smaller, and are referred to as PM2.5.
Last weekend, the PM2.5 count was 993 µg/m3 (micrograms per cubic meter) by official measurements. That is an astounding 40 times the maximum of 25 µg/m3 recommended by the World Health Organisation. In the developed West, the latest proposed guidelines call for a limit of 18 µg/m3 in Europe (by 2020), and 12 µg/m3 in the US.
In the past week the PM2.5 counts in Beijing have eased, but over this weekend they have risen again, to around 400 µg/m3 earlier today.
Young children are especially at risk. Imagine the choice: it's either playing outside breathing bad air, or being cooped up inside all day. And after all this time, surely some of the pollution has made its way inside.
I'm in this culture clash, and it's entirely internal.
Here I am, a proponent of simple living and an advocate of the low-carbon lifestyle: I've got my bike, my high-MPG car, my near-vegetarian cooking, my wind-powered electricty, my steadily dwindling amount of household waste, blah blah.
And there I went jetting off across the Atlantic to get married. Although we weren't high school sweethearts, we had gone to the same high school in the beautiful city of Delft, in the Netherlands. We had both been living in the US for years and years, but I had never got around to un-registering myself from the city, which entitled us to a wedding in its city hall dating from the middle ages.
We had a glorious time at the party, with our families from both sides, some Dutch high school friends, and a few American ones who had found research or postdoc positions around Europe.
But the carbon footprint of this wedding!
In the mid-1970s the illustrious Ivan Illich, Austrian philosopher and critic of Western culture, calculated the average speed of a car to be 3.7 miles per hour, about the speed of a brisk walk.
Illich arrived at this shocking number by dividing the average annual miles per car driven in the US in 1974, approximately 6000 miles, by 1600 hours, which represents the total of time required to make the car go that far. Those hours include the actual time spent actually driving it, the time spent pumping the oil and refining it into gasoline, the time spent by health care professionals on the consequences of traffic accidents, and so on.You might think that this falls firmly in the category of "Lies, d--n lies, and statistics". But Illich used this to illustrate the concept of counterproductivity.
I would like to update the result for the early 2010s. However, I think it is excessive to include such things as the time spent on producing oil and refining it into gasoline: after all, that can be counted towards time that someone else spends on their job.
So in my analysis I am going to count only the amount of time actually spent driving the car, plus the time required to make enough money to own and operate the car.
Is it good news? The US is transitioning, albeit slowly, from dirty coal-burning power plants to electricity generators run on natural gas. Natural gas contains no toxic mercury, and does not generate coal ash and other nasty waste products. The waste product from burning natural gas is carbon dioxide and water.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the nice thing about natural gas is that it generates electricity with a much smaller carbon footprint than coal.
Or does it?
Vive la différence, right? Among humans is precisely our riotous, exuberant spectrum of differences that makes our social interactions so riveting. Even the Dutch, that most egalitarian of societies, sort their young into different high schools: vocational, college bound, educational, etc. according to their ability and inclination.
But if the Dutch government were to institute a rule that says only kids taller than 6ft may attend the college bound high schools, that's called discrimination. Because your height has nothing to do with your scholastic potential.
