As regular readers of this site may have noticed, Varius and I spent a large chunk of last year watching the news cycle like a pair of overcaffeinated neurotic hawks. In all that time, the single factor that hid in the background of almost every major topic was energy. Presidential candidates expounded on their policies for weaning Americans off of foreign-bought oil. Environmentalists sparred with oil, gas, and coal companies over the best ways to reduce carbon emissions from the usage of fossil fuels. Agriculture analysts worried about food shortages stemming from the increase in biofuel production. Technology buffs championed the gradual efficiency improvements in solar cells. Automakers were attacked for failing to make hybrid cars fast enough. Economists linked high gas prices to high everything else prices. In short, virtually every single fucking news story you heard last year related, in some way, to energy.

So will somebody please explain to me why, in all that time, I never heard anybody say anything about the Fusion Reactor they’ve been building in California for the last eleven years? And why, when the project is happening right here in the United States, I finally needed the British to tell me about it?

Last week, while researching articles on starving koalas and Barack Obama’s muscles, I found myself clicking through the online version of the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph. When I saw an article entitled, “Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star,” I immediately assumed that the project was going to be conducted at some prestigious European institution like CERN. But no! It’s actually happening at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. What’s more, the NIF is on the grounds of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the U.S. keeps its nuclear weapons. This was all starting to sound rather ominous.

Luckily though, the “tiny man-made star” isn’t a new weapon. It’s a real live fusion reactor! As in, a power plant that mimics the processes that occur inside the Sun! Holy fuck!

No, I seriously mean it when I say “holy fuck,” because a fusion reactor is big league stuff; potentially far superior to today’s nuclear power plants. Your standard Twentieth Century nuclear power plant utilizes nuclear fission, which involves the breakdown of radioactive isotopes into smaller radioactive isotopes. A fissile chain reaction can produce enormous amounts of energy when harnessed; unfortunately, it also produces hazardous radioactive waste.

In contrast, nuclear fusion, as the name suggests, involves the fusion of two atoms into one. Specifically it’s “the process by which multiple like-charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus,” and in the case of the NIF’s reactor, hydrogen atoms are fused into helium atoms. Which is precisely what happens inside of a star. The process requires an enormous amount of energy, but when successful, the net energy gain is exponential. During a tour of the facility last November, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger explained the numbers thusly:

“The impact will unleash a burst of fusion energy up to 500 billion watts of power and, just to show you what this is, generating the power of the United States and multiply that by a thousand. So that’s what we are talking about, the energy this will create.”

Best of all, fusion reactions are carbon-free and don’t produce radioactive byproducts (theoretically, anyway). And if the fusion process succeeds in creating the predicted, “source of almost limitless energy,” it could put a welcome end to a lot of the arguments I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article.

The NIF is still in the process of calibrating the many lenses and mirrors that will align the 192 high-energy lasers needed to force the fusion reaction. Though the final pieces are now being put into place, the painstaking detail required in these calibrations could push the first test shot back to 2010. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that 2010 isn’t particularly far away anymore. And while I’m annoyed that it’s taken so long for me to find out about this, I have to acknowledge the wisdom of Beak editor Varius when he told me recently,

“The fact that I’m learning about it now, instead of 11 years ago when they started work on it, is even cooler, since it means I don’t have to sit around waiting for them to build the goddamn thing.”

So with the enormous potential of fusion energy, why hasn’t this project received more attention in the national media? I can only speculate, but my guess is that, unlike the coal plants, the NIF is spending their money on actual research, rather than on lobbyists.

Sex is arguably the most powerful motivating force on Earth. It’s no stretch when evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins refer to organic lifeforms as “replication machines.” After all, if Earth species weren’t instinctively obsessed with making more of themselves, they wouldn’t exist long enough to achieve the status of “species.”

Humans, of course, aren’t your typical replication machines. With our big weird brains, we’ve managed the amazing feat of converting sex from a unbelievably fun form of reproduction to an unbelievably fun form of recreation. I mean, go on, name any other animal on the planet that invented the condom, or the birth control pill, or the pull-out method. You can’t, of course. But humanity didn’t stop there. The invention of sex play eventually led to the invention of the sex industry. (Granted, prostitution obviously predates the invention of the condom. Hookers got pregnant a lot more often in the old days.)

Today, the sex industry has become a powerful motivator not only in the hearts and minds of humans, but also in the progression of technology. And to celebrate the powerful alliance of sex and technology this week, PC World Magazine has published a celebration of the many ways in which pornography has made the Internet the wonderfully diverse and efficient phenomenon that it is today.

PC World quotes analyst Bruce Arnold regarding the long reach of porno’s arm:

“The innovations happen because porn is ‘an ecosystem in which participants are willing–indeed forced–to experiment, and where experimentation isn’t hobbled by common sense, good taste, or bureaucracy.’”

And the laundry list of innovations are damned impressive when taken together. For example, PC World credits an entrepreneur named Richard Gordon, who “pioneered credit card transactions for a wide range of disreputable [porn] sites,” with our modern system of e-commerce. They further credit the porn industry with pioneering such online fun as live chat and streaming video. Now think about that: if the porn industry hadn’t perfected streaming video, there would be no YouTube.

In one memorable anecdote, the article explains how one well-known pornography company actually helped by giving out free modems:

“In the 1990s, Penthouse magazine gave away 2400-baud modems with the periodical’s logo on them… At the time these modems offered the fastest way to access the magazine’s popular XXX bulletin boards. Clearly, in the early years of the Net, nobody had a greater need for a bigger, fatter pipe than the adult industry and its customers.”

Perhaps appropriately, Internet porn also spreads some truly horrific electronic diseases. The article credits web smut with the propagation of such festering discharges as spam, malware, and pop-ups. Now, if this were a much cheesier website, or if I were some sort of pathetic corporate schill, this is about the time that I’d roll out some inane punchline, like, “which is why it’s always important to have protection: with the Norton Internet Security suite!” But I’m not, so fuck that.

Instead, I’ll just urge you, during this holiday season, to take a few moments out of your busy schedule and show a little gratitude to the driving force that has changed your online life in so many ways. Go ahead. Pour a little more rum into your eggnog, dim the lights, and masturbate to some Internet pornography. Because our collective horniness enriches all our lives.

Hey there Beaky Buddies, it’s time for another peek into The Beak’s Holiday Advent Calendar! Yeah, we skipped a few days since the last installment, but trust us, you didn’t miss anything. Day #16 was a Lego donkey and Day #17 was a California Raisins Christmas tree ornament from 1987. Days 18 and 19 were both Cadbury Creme Eggs (Varius likes them so much that he insisted on putting two in). But Advent Calendar present #20 is truly a gift worth writing about!

This one goes out to all you nerds who have spent the last eight years complaining about how the 21st century isn’t as cool as your childhood fantasies. “Waah,” you’ve cried, “Where’s my jet pack? Where’s my Rosie the robot maid? Where’s my renewable nonpolluting energy source? Where’s my flying car?”

I got your flying car right here!

That’s right kids, it’s an honest-to-Beak brand spanking new Terrafugia Transition flying car! And all you need to claim your present is $148,000 and a pilot’s license. You can go ahead and place your $10,000 deposit online, guaranteeing that you’ll be one of the first to get your very own flying car when they go into mass-production in 2009.

Actually, Terrafugia, Inc. refers to the vehicle as a “roadable aircraft,” so it’s more accurate to think of it as an airplane that can drive, rather than as a car that can fly. The Transition has wings that fold up for easy storage in your garage. It has a propeller on the back and runs on ordinary gasoline. For a closer look at the interior controls, here’s a video starring a nice man who has the same haircut that I had when I was five years old:

I’ll grant that it’s fucking goofy-looking. I was hoping that the carplane of the future would look more like a cross between a Ferrari and an iPod. And there are other factors which inhibit the Transition from being a first class Jet Punk fantasy. The propeller doesn’t work in ground-mode, a runway is required for takeoff, and the thing doesn’t turn on without an access code keyed in by a licensed pilot. But I’m sure all that shit can be hacked eventually.

So! Your holiday mission is to convince all the rich people you know to start buying up Terrafugia Transitions. Because the more they sell now, the more we’ll be able to find (comparatively) cheap used ones a couple of years from now. And then we can mod the fuck out of ‘em, and have a 2012 D.I.Y. Beaksmas Eve convoy in the sky!

I’ve been using Twitter. Hell, almost everyone’s been using Twitter. It’s easier than actual blogging, and it lets you keep your friends (and probably some strangers) updated on the goings-on of your life. Plus, there’s the fun, stupid challenge of it — how much information can you fit into the 140-character limit? It’s like writing a haiku, without all that lotus-blossom bullshit!

In addition to all of that, Twitter serves as an excellent repository for all the strange thoughts that zip through your head during the day. How many times have you thought, “I always assumed Scooby Snacks would taste kind of like beef jerky,” only to realize that none of your friends are around to be wowed by your epiphany? Why, by the time you see everyone, you’ll have forgotten all about this particular flash of genius! Sure, you could call someone, or even send a text message, but that only reaches one person. Twitter solves this dilemma by allowing you to send that thought to the internet, where your friends (and anyone else who stumbles upon your Twitter account) can read it.

For me, though, Twitter has helped me get past a rather unpleasant bit of my childhood. I spent a considerable portion of my youth in and around South Bend, Indiana, which may or may not be the most boring place on Earth. News of the outside world came to us in the form of a small-town paper. Admittedly, most of it was the same wire service crap you see in every other newspaper in the country, but we still had people covering the local news. And, like many small-town papers of its day, it had someone on staff whose sole purpose was to write observational humor.

Maybe you know him? Older fellow, probably wearing a bowtie in his photo, with a column called something like “As I See It” or “If You Ask Me” or, god forbid, “Musings.” Each week, the “Culture” section would play host to 15-20 of his ostensibly amusing observations about life. We’re talking really horrible confused-old-man bullshit here; lots of, “What the heck’s an e-mail?” and, “I remember when bread was a nickel and a car was a quarter,” and, “That waitress’s nose ring frightens me.”

He tried to include punchlines, of course, and turn his complaints into little jokes — “People had pierced noses when I was young, too, but we called them ‘fishing accidents’ and they didn’t cost $50.” And I, as a lad of perhaps thirteen years old, realized something:

I was funnier than this asshole.

I’m not an especially brilliant comedic talent, and I was even less so at age 13, but damn it, I was funnier than this asshole. Not only was I confident that I could have written a better column, I was pretty sure I was even more of a crotchety old man than he was, despite his 50-year head start. I have seen nothing in the years since this revelation to make me believe otherwise. Am I funny enough to be on TV? Probably not. Am I funnier than you? Matter of opinion. Am I funnier than the bowtie-wearing geezers that once polluted America’s local newspapers? You’re goddamn right I am. For fuck’s sake, I wrote that Scooby Snack joke back in the second paragraph, and that shit is gold!

There is simply no way I am alone in this experience. Surely thousands, perhaps millions of others have read the unfunny musings in their local paper and thought, “I could do this better,” and been completely correct.

Twitter gives us the chance to prove it. Each tweet we send out, be it about moronic coworkers, Nick at Nite, or a really epic sneeze, sends a message. We don’t need your cut-rate Andy Rooneys! We can observe life’s little absurdities our own damn selves! We are legion, we are reasonably entertaining, and this vegan-friendly chocolate pudding is fucking delicious!

Well, that, or we’ll all turn into crotchety old men ourselves, but at least we won’t have an editor breathing down our necks and telling us we can’t say “fuck.” So, still funnier.

It’s often said, by folks with the right mixture of cynicism and accuracy, that the simplest way to convince people to do things that are selfless and wonderful and for the benefit of the entire world, is to find a way to make it profitable. For example, it’s all well and good to say that millions of people bought those energy-saver light bulbs because they wanted to do something good for the planet, but in reality, it was the promise of a savings on the monthly electric bill that sealed the deal. The conversion from fossil fuels to clean energy — which is progressing, if infuriatingly slowly — is the clearest illustration of this principle.

The problem is that whenever it becomes viable to exploit something for the greater good, there will arise those individuals who endeavor to exploit the benevolent exploitation for purely selfish motives. And thus do we find the “clean coal” lobby. While it’s theoretically possible to capture and store all the CO₂ emissions put out by a burning chunk of coal, no one is actually doing it at present, especially not on a power plant-level scale. Which means that, anytime you see an advertisement or a politician extolling the supposed virtues of clean coal technology, it’s a safe bet to assume that they’re probably assholes who are trying to trick you.

And this is what tends to drive environmentalists nuts, as packs of brainless greedbags do their damnedest to overshadow developments in genuinely clean energy sources like solar power for the sake of the same filthy carbon-rich rocks that used to plunge entire cities into perpetual smoggy twilight back in the days of the Industrial Revolution. And this is why I was so pleased to see the following commercial repeatedly aired this week on cable TV:

The ad is being put out by a group called The Reality Coalition who, as far as I’ve been able to determine thus far, are a new organization dedicated to calling bullshit on clean coal propaganda. According to their website,

“The Reality Coalition is a project of the Alliance for Climate Protection, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters, and tells the truth about coal today — it isn’t clean. We are challenging the coal industry to come clean — in its advertising and in its operations.”

So, kudos to those guys. In the search for new sources of clean energy, it’s also important to seek out new sources of ball-busting.

Over the summer, director/animator/mastermind Hayao Miyazaki released his new movie, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (or Gake no Ue no Ponyo, if you wanna get technical), in Japan. There’s a good chance it will see the same sort of US release as his previous films –fancy new English dialogue, all-star cast, distribution by Disney, etc. Eventually, there will be a deluxe DVD (and probably Blu-Ray), and that will be the first chance most Americans will get to hear the original Japanese audio.

That’s the official plan, at least. The internet isn’t going along with it, and a few downloads of Ponyo have already appeared. Homemade subtitle files are even easier to come by, since it’s technically legal to distribute them. I was able to watch it yesterday, with only the tiniest bit of scheming and absolutely no knowledge of the Japanese language.

It’s cute, and decidedly un-Disney-like, as I’ve come to expect from Miyazaki. The plot concerns a boy named Sosuke who befriends an adorable little fish-person named Ponyo, who decides she wants to become human. So she does, not even halfway into the movie, and her transformation throws the world out of balance. The village is flooded, the sea is full of resurrected prehistoric fish, and Sosuke and Ponyo set out in a tiny boat to pick Sosuke’s mom up from work. There’s more to it than that, with cranky sea-wizards and goddesses and stuff, but I swear everything I said about the plot actually happens.

I’m not here to review the movie, though. I’ll do that when the English version comes out, so I can complain about it. No, this is a reminiscence.

You see, many years ago, when I was barely-legal and had a full head of hair, a friend handed me a battered VHS tape, and told me I simply had to see this insane movie. The movie turned out to be Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, which nobody in America had heard of at the time, subtitled at home by some enterprising fan and copied onto countless bootleg tapes for trading among his friends, and their friends, and so forth.

And damn it, that’s what I’m thankful for this year: that, as time goes on and technology becomes increasingly awesome, it becomes less necessary to have shady contacts when you want to see an obscure movie.

Last week’s big automaker bailout meeting in Washington proved that the Big 3 aren’t just incompetent at the top; they’re also disastrously stupid in terms of marketing and showmanship.

By now I assume almost everyone’s seen the video of Representatives Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Brad Sherman (D-CA) berating CEOs Alan Mulally of Ford, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Richard Wagoner of GM over their decision to travel to Washington in three private jets. If you haven’t seen it, it’s actually quite funny from a smart-poor-people-who-hate-dumb-rich-people perspective.

The big issue here, in a nutshell, is that the three principle American automakers are in financial trouble, and are asking for loans from a public that believes them to be fundamentally wasteful and incompetent. Congress can’t just ignore them outright, since they’re responsible for millions of American jobs, but they also can’t just hand out money to someone the voters despise.

The key to all of this is public opinion (especially since the stock market now fluctuates with all the rationality of a manic-depressive fifteen-year-old), and it is here that the Big 3 execs really demonstrated their ability to truly, horribly, disastrously fuck the fuck up.

All they needed to turn this around was a big, impressive stunt. And by that I mean a stunt that demonstrates innovation, dedication to alternative fuels and environmental concerns, and fiscal conservatism. It doesn’t even have to be a big deal. If any one of those three CEOs had shown up in Washington driving an electric car, or a hydrogen fuel-cell prototype, or a car with a solar cell on top, or really anything that screamed, “next generation of new and exciting cars,” that would have sent a message to the American people that they were willing to pander to expectations. It would have been even more impressive if the CEOs had been behind the wheel themselves, to save money on drivers.

Instead, the bastards each showed up on separate $20,000 private jets. All three jets even left from the same airport at the same time! This of course sends the message that the CEOs of the biggest car companies in the U.S. don’t know jack shit about budgeting.

Rick Sanchez read a Twitter message from a viewer on his show on Thursday which sums up the public reaction quite succinctly:

“There are only two kinds of people who fly on private jets: people with too much money, and private jet pilots.”
–source unknown

Really, the solidarity didn’t help, either. If even one of the Big 3 representatives had made a bold gesture while the other two rode their jets, he probably could have gone back to Detroit with an oversized novelty check from the taxpayers. To be fair, Ford’s Alan Mullally did actually drive himself from the hotel to the hearings in a hybrid car. If only he’d canceled the jet altogether and driven the hybrid all the way from Detroit, then we might actually fucking care.

And at a time when anybody with a pulse could tell you that Americans are hungry for transportation solutions that reduce the need for foreign oil, Ford CEO Alan Mullally told CNN anchor John Roberts on Tuesday that he’s “focused on improving the internal combustion engine.” Are you fucking kidding me? Mullally, you dumb motherfucker, listen to me: your customers do not want another decade of R&D that results in a 5% decrease of gasoline usage. Your customers want to plug their cars into a windmill and fucking go.

At this point, I’m almost certain that these guys don’t have the brain power to make these sorts of logic leaps, nor do they seem willing to hire consultants that do. Even Mitt Romney has publicly declared that we should let them go bankrupt. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) eventually announced that the Big 3 had failed, and will get one more chance:

Which means that, in all likelihood, we’ll get to see the Big 3 CEOs fuck up again in early December. Unless of course they’d like to hire myself and Varius as temporary consultants, in which case, we’d be happy to explain the mindset of the general populace in as much detail as they require. For a modest fee, of course.

Scientists at NASA announced the indefinite slumber of the Phoenix Mars Lander on Monday, and the official completion of Phoenix’s mission. While Phoenix’s equipment is all still in working order, the problem is a lack of power. The Martian north pole, where Phoenix is stationed, has moved into its winter season. Much like Earth’s North Pole, the Martian north pole is subject to Polar Night, meaning that the region receives very little sunlight during the winter months. Phoenix’s solar cells, unable to absorb enough energy, have ceased to function. NASA believes that the long-term lack of power may result in the effective “death” of Phoenix. To make matters worse, the extreme temperatures of Martian winter may be cold enough to damage circuit boards and solar arrays.

Phoenix is survived by its older siblings Spirit and Opportunity, two rovers that are still in service closer to the planet’s equator. According to Five Years on Mars, a program which I saw on the National Geographic Channel last week, the programmers of Spirit and Opportunity have avoided Phoenix’s fate by cleverly driving the rovers up inclines, in order to angle their solar panels toward the sun for maximum exposure during the winter months, collecting just enough photons to keep their little electric brains functional.

Phoenix does have an experimental “Lazarus Mode” feature, which in theory may allow it to return to functional capacity next spring (Mars spring, not Earth spring), depending mostly on how much damage the rover’s hardware has suffered in the meantime.

Phoenix said its goodbyes to Earthlings last week via its Twitter page, in a heartwarming display of simulated robotic affection:

“It’s very unlikely I’ll wake up next spring… but if I do I’ll call home.”
Nov. 9, 2008.

Phoenix also recently wrote a series of longer posts on Gizmodo, expounding on the philosophy of the pioneer robot mind:

“One of the most common questions I’m asked, and one of the most difficult to explain, is whether I knew going in that this mission would cost me my life. The answer to that is yes, of course, and there’s not a single robotic explorer in our solar system that doesn’t know it faces the same fate. Unlike all of you, most of us can’t go home again.”
Nov. 4, 2008.

See? Really tugs at the old heartstrings. Or heart circuits. Whatever.

Spring returns to Mars’ north pole in October 2009, so if Phoenix has a shot at resurrection, it’ll be then. Either way, the Phoenix Project is proof that NASA is doing cool shit again. It’s about damn time!

Apparently, Michael Moore released a new movie today. It’s called Slacker Uprising, and you can download it for free at slackeruprising.com. I haven’t yet, because it’s a big-ass file, and I totally forgot it was coming out today. So instead of a review, let’s look at the implications.

Why does a well-known, reputable artist release free content on the web? There seem to be three major reasons.

1. The artist has fallen so far that he’s willing to do anything to get an audience.

Now, Michael Moore has generated more than his share of controversy and outrage, thanks to selective editing of his films, and by simply being a big fat liberal with an axe to grind, but he’s hardly an unemployable pariah. If anything, his career has benefited from all the controversy. His detractors are as rabid as ever, and so are his die-hard fans, and the rest of us are generally willing to give his movies a chance. In short, he gets interviewed.

2. The artist is embracing a radical new model of distribution, or advocating for copyright reform, or something along those lines.

That’s certainly a popular reason right now. Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free, and it seems to be working out for him. Radiohead allowed fans to choose how much they paid for their new album, including $0.00. Recently, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has jumped on the free-stuff bandwagon, and has been producing new music at a rapid pace (especially compared to the period when he took half-decade “vacations” between albums).

Moore would be in good company, and given his politics, I’m sure he’s spent time thinking about distribution and all that, but if that’s why he was releasing his movie for free, he would have written about it more. Really, once you get into this stuff, it’s hard to shut up about it. I can’t.

3. This is strictly a fans-only affair.

The cruel flipside of reason #2. Sometimes, you just put something out for free because you know 99% of people won’t want to pay for it. It’s not that it’s bad, exactly, it’s just inside-jokey and light on content; the sort of thing more suitable for a DVD extra than for a feature film. But since Moore doesn’t have any movies coming out on DVD in the near future, and probably doesn’t feel like re-releasing any of the old ones as Deluxe 2-Disc Editions, he has to get this thing out there somehow. So, the internet.

Glancing through the Slacker Uprising site, the fans-only nature of this project becomes clear. You know why? Because it’s a movie about Moore’s voter-registration efforts during the 2004 Presidential election. Remember that election? The one we lost? Yeah. Now there’s a movie about how we tried to win, and at least thought we might be able to. In other words, if you weren’t in attendance at one of Moore’s public appearances in 2004 (which the movie documents), you probably won’t find much to be happy about.

Eh. I’ll probably download it anyway. Maybe it’ll be good.

Something strange is happening in the upper echelon of General Motors. Last week I reported on the unveiling of the Chevy Volt, GM’s latest attempt at joining the electric car revolution. Though many critics, looking back to the EV1 debacle, remain skeptical of GM’s intentions, most of the company’s official statements have been predictably upbeat. Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner said, “The Volt symbolizes GM’s commitment to the future.” Line director Tony Posawatz said it will, “have real great ride and handling.” Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, on the other hand, when asked if the Volt will help you pick up chicks, said, “You’re gonna get a lot of very nice no-makeup environmentalists.”

Lutz appeared on The Colbert Report Wednesday, ostensibly to discuss the Volt, but also to deny that global warming was caused by CO2 emissions, to mock solar cells, and to belittle his potential customers. While some have praised the interview, what I saw was a grumpy old man who’s bitter that people aren’t buying his cars as much as they used to, and he’s resentful that his company must release a vehicle that doesn’t do it the old-fashioned way in order to stay afloat. Never mind that the Volt could very well save GM from those $3.3 billion quarterly losses. The weirdest part was when he was talking about the optional photovoltaic roof (a brilliant innovation), and he kept saying, “If you leave it in the sun.” Like the automobile of the future is a jar of mayonnaise.

Lutz discussed the interview on his blog, explaining that the purpose of the interview was to introduce the Volt to a younger market.

“Those facts are now known to the huge Colbert Nation, which consists primarily of millions of educated, successful young people, including many who are not generally predisposed to consider GM cars… All in all, an experience as useful as it was unconventional!”

Which suggests that Lutz is aware of us, but doesn’t seem to realize that we think he’s a bit of an ass, or that we all remember when he called Global Warming “a total crock of shit” in January. Lutz started his current position at GM in 2002, the year before the complete annihilation of the EV1 line, which the company chose to destroy even though the test lessees offered to buy the vehicles outright rather than see them disappear. Which makes his motives suspect. Is Lutz’s double-talk the beginning of another attempt to discredit the electric car from the inside, or is he just a moron? And how much more of this will his shareholders tolerate?

Well, if GM is up to their old tricks, don’t worry too much. Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley start-up and the makers of the Tesla Roadster (the first modern electric sports car) are working on a family-sized sedan and a compact, both entirely electric. The Tesla sedans are scheduled for release in 2010, about the same time as the Volt.

And back in the mainstream, Toyota is already working on the next generation of their best-selling hybrid Prius, which will use even less gasoline than the current line. So really, all GM has to decide is whether they want to try holding the revolution back for a second time, or if they actually want a piece of the eco-friendly pie.