Resolution: Forget the cost factor, Mass Extinction is looming

Ideas wanted - what's "next" for these green-sustainable developements?

Are you a consultant? If you have comments or suggestions on what I can do "next" about these, please kindly shoot them out ..

The revived battery process was chosen by Canadian Business magazine as one of the top three inventions for 2008.

Please note our new telephone numbers

Updated Solar Power Roadshow Activities List

Solar Power Roadshow new phone number 604-512-9567 SolarPowerRoadshow [at] yahoo [dot] com On-site requirements:

Dr. Jim Stevenson and the mayor of North Van presented Al Gore's slide show (not the movie.) The slide show is interesting because it was customised by Stevenson for local content. We also took the Revived Battery electric pickup, which was displayed outside Capilano College's theater, and seemed to inspire lots of young people, as you'll see in these video clips.

Here's a link to a video blog of what Jenny Kwan, Vancouver MLA and several citizens said about our electric pickup at the Mt. Pleasant Harvest Festival, where our EV was on display:

http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=1119305339

Here's a link to a video blog of what Jenny Kwan, Vancouver MLA and several citizens said about our electric pickup at the Mt. Pleasant Harvest Festival, where our EV was on display:

http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=1119305339

Sad to learn, during our festival activities, that almost no young child is aware of Salmon Decline or Conservation of fish stocks thru Catch and Release fishing methods. So, we at Solar Power Roadshow started something we call the Catch and Release Fishing Conservation Roadshow.. here's a video clip:

Doing Errands with the world's first licensed electric pickup truck that runs on Revived Batteries

 http://ev-diary.blogspot.com/

EV DIARY - PART FOUR

http://evdiary-revived-pickup.blogspot.com/

Check out our trip photos, click on link above. People love to talk to us about this, especially after the CBC aired David Attenborough's complete "The Truth About Climate Change", of which, part two was about solving what the scientists called, "a foreseeable catastrophe."

Hello,

Peter Mansbridge and the CBC Newsworld's crew has been airing, nightly, devastating stories of the effects of climate change around the world. It pains me to watch this. Have you seen it?

This show compels me and my informal group of electronic hobbyists to put in an effort to put five electric vehicles, running from Revived Batteries (taken from a scrap pile, thereby reducing pollution at the same time) on Vancouver's roads.

We already have three battery breakthroughs in our electric pickup truck, which you can check out in the EV Album webpages. It is the first battery vehicle with a per-mile cost that is a fraction of the cost of gasoline.

However, we need more 'nearly- free-energy' cars/trucks on the road. Five such vehicles should inspire people everywhere, that they are not helpless, either.

Let's do it now. Yesterday.

However, we're just hobbyists, and are clueless about raising funds. We need help here.

Is there anything you can do?

Yours truly,

Rob Matthies
306 - 349 East 6th Avenue,
Vancouver, BC
V5T 1J9
( 6 0 4 ) 7 3 9 - 7 7 1 7

P.S. Have you read the new book, "Lives Per Gallon"?

Here's what the newspapers and TV said about
our 'no cost' battery electric vehicle:
http://tv-news-revived-batteries.blogspot.com/

I saw the movie Shark Water on the weekend. EVEN IF YOU ARE AFRAID OF SHARKS, YOU SHOULD SEE THIS MOVIE. It is not scary and you will see them in a different light. It was without doubt the most important and amazing movie I have seen in the last several years. It left me almost speechless. Even if you don’t care about or are afraid of sharks, everyone needs to know that they are becoming extinct and what that means to land dwellers is this:

EV DIARY - Part Two- WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR COTTAGE INDUSTRY?

Everything here is just my opinion, my two cents worth, and my opinion could be wrong, too.

Did you see the movie, "Who Killed The Electric Car?" and wondered why the dozens of small electric car makers never became more successful? In fact, almost all of them bit the dust, or went belly-up! The notable exceptions include CANEV in Vancouver Island, probably because most of his business is for airport utility trucks, not cars. The other notable exception is AC Propulsion in California.

Here's a photo of Mladin (rhymes with Alladin) at Kerrisdale dropping off a 3lb. bag of dead batteries to compost. The batteries are being picked up with an electric pickup (bad pun, huh?)

This is the electric pickup that runs on Revived Batteries, being put to good use.

Your support of the Solar Power Roadshow makes this possible.

EV Diary - Part One - March 27 07

This diary will likely look like other Electric Vehicle

diaries, except that I'll be diarizing about driving

the world's first licensed pickup truck (a converted

Click below to link to Burnaby Now's website

http://www.burnabynow.com/issues07/024207/news/024207nn1.html

or, if that doesn't work, try the link below

http://electric-vehicle-article.blogspot.com/

Was at the panel discussion and showing of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" last night at Ridge cinema. One of the panelists (a PhD prof) stated that a kiwi costs 16X its weight in carbon emissions; a banana, some 2-1/2 times its weight. Several panelists and people from the audience drove home the point: Buy what is locally grown.

After the panel discussion, I asked one of the prof's about the 200-MIle Diet (Utne magazine article) and he opined that its quite possible that the 200-Mile Diet (the predecessor of Vancouver's 100 Mile Diet) is ENOUGH, BY ITSELF to save the planet from Climate Change -- although he stated that since its unlikely that entire populations would be able to adhere to the 200-Mile Diet, we should also conserve energy, etc etc etc.

World's First, in Electric Cars, eh? Yes, in Vancouver

Who Killed the Electric Car? Well, in Vancouver, a small victory in reviving the electric car happened today!http://www.geocities.com/robert04mat/electric_pickup_truck.html

We've been using revived batteries successfully for electric bikes and scooters. Now, we have a 4-wheel electric vehicle that appears to be the first 4-wheeler to run only off "scrap batteries." By G. Tang and R. Matthies. First successful road run was on February, 2007, in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

This Electric Pickup Truck Runs on Revived Batteries
http://www.geocities.com/robert04mat/electric_pickup_truck.html

Photos of the work, from the start...

http://towing-s15.blogspot.com/

http://electric-pickup.blogspot.com/

Have you used the Internet to plan you bus/Seabus/Skytrain?  The GVRD's public transportation's "Trip Planner" web site and phone line? On their phone line, saying "agent" is suppossed to provide a live person.

During the holiday season, my experience was that there was essentially 'no service'.

I found similar complaints in the Discover Vancouver Forum, too.

PLEASE ADD TO YOUR EVENTS CALENDAR: Anybody Can Make Solar Ovens at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts' Rhododendron Festival on May 6, 2007. This is a FREE festival, open to the public.

Anybody travel in the poorer parts of the world and wonder how they afford costly imported toilet paper? Do some research and share your discovery, too. (I know the answer.)  

 Just a little humour below..

 Funny Picture -- Who Needs Toilet Paper?.

Gary Tang and I joined the hundreds of people at the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Assn fundraiser at Ridge Theatre in Kits. VEVA was showing its 1917 Detroit Electric car and there were other electric cars, but imho, only Gordon Wong's e-car was equal to a gasoline-burning (internal combustion engine, or ICE) car. The others were weak, or lacked durability -- one got wet, and had to be towed. However, a good point about joining the Car Co-op was stated, during the after-movie panel discussions: Use an e-car or ebike to get to a Car Co-op location, and rent the coop's car only for the few hours that long-range driving is needed. To me, that makes good sense.

Further to my earlier blog about the "10 Years Left to Save...", I discovered that a Goggle search brings up more readable text than the JPG photo of the Times article that was in my blog. Hansen's warming is one of the reasons we're going with an all-battery electric car (in another blog.).

Hi y'all.. manufacturing plastics uses up tons of energy -- just like batteries, as mentioned in my 'change' for 2007. One website states that it takes 50X the energy to make an small non-rechargeable AA battery than the battery actually produces -- not to mention the waste disposal issues. Think of plastic as you would a non-rechargeable battery, then.

I'd going to try to be somewhat "plastic-neutral" by reUSEing my plastic. Everybody here can help become plastic-neutral, too. How? Give my summer school students your **clean** plastic salad boxes, tubes, PVC pipes (from construction renovation), plant pots, shoe boxes, salad spinners, yogurt containers, and any other object that could conceivably made into a musical intrument -- where they will be used to teach inventive, creative, recycling -- at the Sustainable Music Factory. I'll provide drop off locations - school and college locations in Vancouver, West Van, and North Van in a follow up post.

Now, this is not the $30 device I referred to in my earlier post. However, some people out there seem to be creative, so here is a photo of their toilet-paper reduction scheme.

Its just a little humour .. very little.

Cheers! 

TOILET PAPER: At our events and magic shows, people are really surprised to learn that the use of toilet paper can be reduced drastically, or even eliminated, with a $30 device that takes 15 minutes to install. (I don't sell this product.) I have this at home myself. What is it? Do a Goggle search on mystery device that saves trees and dollars and Solar Power Roadshow, and you'll find out, while having fun looking for it.

Ironically, our recent wild, windy weather comes from global warming/climate change!

Since BC has some of this planet's best wind resources, why not put it to good use? With wind turbines -- like the ones we helped people make at Science World. You'll also see revived batteries (battery recycling, or rather reUSE) and plastics recycled into toys!

Here's a link to photos..

Today started off with dark skies, and a rainshower. It didn't stop my electric biking, going from Main and Broadway to the St. George's school campus near UBC, travelling along the "spine" of the city, the 37th Avenue bike route, crossing Vancouver's highest points, on a very windy day.

How do I do this, when most cyclists are hiding, waiting for better weather? Its easy. I wear ski goggles to keep the eyeballs from freezing, and a really good $2 face mask (smog mask) sold by Daiso at the Aberdeen Mall in Richmond. I also use a biking rain poncho which is popular in China -- there's a version made locally in Vancouver by the Bike Doctor on Broadway. To prevent cold hands, I wear neoprene gloves used by divers.

Scientific American sometimes MISses on information. And then, there's the problem with some information MISsing (or perhaps there's just a lot of MISinformation out there), for example, in respect to electric vehicles and batteries. Sadly, most writers don't have an e-car or e-bike. (I own four evehicles and use them daily.) Worse, you've got writers who write about batteries in evehicles who don't really "play" with batteries. (My students and I play with batteries.)

I though a bit and came up with ideas on how to recycle some trash into educational materials for students, and will get students to do this. Here's a link to photos of sustainable music during the Christmas holidays:

http://musical-pipes.blogspot.com/

http://sustainable-factory.blogspot.com/

UPDATE: Workshops on using recycled materials into homemade musical instruments will run in North Vancouver this year. It's called Sustainable Music Factory.

Yup, we're getting the electric car (small GMC Sierra S-15 actually, not the Chevy S-10) which will have to be restored, after we figure out the electrics and mechanical problems and hurdles. Several people emailed words of encouragement and even jokes (love humour, keep 'em coming) We send out this email, text below, and got replies, which is also shown below..

Subject: Help! There's no users manual for this electric vehicle, so..

http://electric-pickup.blogspot.com/

Can you help us? We need explanations for the puzzling items pointed out in thse photos, in order to get this anti-Climate-Warming vehicle on the road to Sustainability. Thanks in advance for all comments and suggestions. Each photo is numbered. You can Zoom In on any photo with a mouse click.

Being vegetarian is the most important action an individual can take for this planet, according to Einstein. Local veggies, even better.It is unfortunate that the attendees of the Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival didn't get any information about the beef hot dogs and beef hamburders and chicken nugges they were buying on Commercial Drive at the time. Accordiing to some posts and letters I've read, a meat-eater is WORSE than an SUV owner in terms of his/her footprin on Climate Change. Anybody have comments?

Althought Solar Power Roadshow has been in the media or pubic eye regularly, we have found it disappointing that most people aren't aware of the energy-savings and freedeom from petro-fear that everybody can achieve by using (apparently little-known) future energy and transportation products/services that are available right now, in Vancouver.

These include novel items we've shown on national TV such as water-powered calculators to 1-watt LED lightbulbs ($4/each) that give out approximately the same brightness as 8-watt CFL bulbs or 40-watt incandescent bulbs; or, wind-powered lights so small they fit in your hand. More later..