alternative fuels

Driving a hybrid isn't green enough these days.

Maybe not enough to earn a California HOV lane sticker when you're a solo driver, anyway.

California lawmakers appear ready to up the ante on hybrid car owners who have enjoyed driving solo in the multi-passenger vehicle lanes, the Los Angeles Times reports. Stickers granting that privilege to 85,000 California hybrid drivers are set to expire in January of 2011. Proposals to extend the program would exclude most of the vehicles currently included in the program.

 Instead, lawmakers appear likely to offer the carpool lane exemptions to drivers of vehicles powered by electricity, natural gas or some other alternative fuel. A competing bill would offer it only to drivers of hybrid vehicles achieving fuel economy rates of 65 mpg or better, much higher than the current generation of hybrid cars.

"We're bummed," said Cathy Margolin, president of the 250-member Orange County Prius Club. "I drive from Newport Beach to Torrance to teach four times a week, and it saves me an hour every day on the 405."

-- Rita Hibbard

It was one thing to see ExxonMobil's ad right on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Monday, headlined "Energy from algae" and rhapsodizing about how its research efforts could someday result in algae taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Fair enough. If a company decides to spend $600 million on research aimed at heading off disastrous levels of climate change, it can legitimately give itself a highly visible public pat on the back.

But then I came across the Forbes piece, also published on Monday, that calls ExxonMobil the "green company of the year." Puh-leeze! (Subhead: "Oil from algae? Just a sideshow, Exxon's real thrust into green energy is a big bet on natural gas.")

One need look no further than today's headlines to see that ExxonMobil, far from being a "green" company, is pleading guilty to killing migratory birds.

OK, so obviously Forbes writer Christopher Heiman was reporting his piece long before this dead-birds case hit the news. But still, the mind reels trying to figure out how he and his editors could have come to the conclusion that ExxonMobil is somehow worthy of high praise for its environmental record.

Curtis Brainerd's "The Observatory" column for Columbia Journalism Review does a thorough job of explaining why Forbes stumbled badly here, simply based on the fact that Heiman found that natural gas is significantly better than coal from a greenhouse-gas standpoint. True enough, and it's also true that Exxon's going great guns on natural gas.