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...Fritz Henderson announced this week that the company's much anticipated Chevy Volt (half electric, half fossil fuel) is the undisputed winner in the miles-per-gallon race, claiming that under new EPA guidelines the Volt will hit 230 miles per gallon (city), the first car to ever earn triple-digit fuel efficiency. Not to be outdone, Nissan fired back a few days later to its Twitter base of fans that its just-announced all-electric Nissan Leaf would be rated at 367 m.p.g., also using EPA guidelines. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
...EPA's methodology behind the Volt's eye-popping 230-m.p.g. rating, and those of other so-called extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs), is still under wraps - though GM and others claim to be using it - and the agency says it can't comment since it has not yet tested the Volt. In the meantime, the Society of Auto Engineers continues to tinker with its new hybrid test protocols. It has a lot of automotive fans scratching their heads about the recent Volt m.p.g. claims and how pure-electric vehicles and hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles stack up. (See the best...
...EPA's National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich., says it's revising its formulas to better reflect real-world representations of "driving cycles": that is, up hills, down hills, acceleration rates, city miles and highway miles - the driving conditions that affect fuel efficiency or, in the case of hybrids and electric cars, how long the battery will last. This is why the EPA says it "cannot confirm" GM's mileage claims but is happy the company is innovating such fuel-efficient cars...
...renewable-energy standard. When the powerful farm lobby balked at the bill, it was changed to allow farmers to sell offsets from agriculture, such as no-till farming, which leaves carbon in the soil. Worse, oversight of the agricultural offsets was taken away from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and given to the Department of Agriculture, which isn't exactly a neutral party...
...bill will significantly slow the growth of U.S. electricity consumption over time. But carbon offsets are dicey, and may not actually provide the emissions reductions they claim to. (Studies have called into question the quality of the offsets run under the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol system.) And a new EPA analysis of the bill forecast that the total amount of renewable energy generation under Waxman-Markey would actually be less than the renewable energy that would have been produced without the bill. (The share of renewables in the total U.S. electricity market will be larger under the bill, because total...