The things you can convert when you are a carpenter are impressive! Just check out this bus home. 

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The post This Carpenter Used His Skills to Convert a Bus into a Home! [Video] appeared first on EcoSalon.

Not from the Hill or the Street this time, but I just had to bring this up…

China has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases and biggest energy consumer. That’s staggering and all the more terrifying, knowing the rate and capacity at which industry has evolved and grown there. There is one area, however, where China is attempting to curtail its deep carbon footprint.

Meet the straddle bus.

In an effort to go green and relieve traffic congestion without widening roads to accommodate more cars, the Shenzhen Huashi Future ParkingEquipment company is developing a “3D Express Coach” (also known as a “three-dimensional fast bus”). I think of it more as a pretend-you’re-in-a-video-game adventure ride: It’s less dangerous-sounding that way.

Here’s how it works: The monorail on steroids will allow cars less than two meters high to travel underneath the upper level of the vehicle which will be carrying passengers, who were not rendered in the drafter’s graphic seen above, but are most certainly laughing at the screaming drivers and passengers in the cars below them (“My god, the tunnel – it won’t stop following me!”)

According to China Hush, the 6-meter-wide 3D Express Coach will be powered by a combination of electricity and solar energy, and will be able to travel up to 60 kilometers per hour carrying some 1200 to 1400 passengers. You read that right. A large Greyhound bus houses 49 passengers. A typical passenger plane seats roughly 300. This behemoth is green, certainly not lean, and if it goes out of control, God help us all.

And it’s set for construction in Beijing’s Mentougou district by the end of this year. The Chairman of the Huashi Future Parking Equipment company boasts that it will only take a year and $73 million to build and operate the thing. Which is why I get ever more frustrated every time I see the still unfinished San Francisco Bay Bridge lazily huddled in the ocean like a section of braces that an orthodontist forgot to remove from a kid’s mouth.

You hear that, Bay Bridge? China’s built one of you that can drive.

The post China Builds Bus That Drives Over Cars: Be Very Afraid appeared first on EcoSalon.

When I was in elementary school I gave zero thought to what auto emissions were doing to the environment. Not once did I look up at the black spew happily chortling up from my school bus and wonder where it went and what it meant. Maybe it was because I grew up in Detroit where such thoughts fell somewhere between anathema and simply way off radar. Today, of course, kids are different. (Well, some kids.) It’s second nature for them to wonder about such things. And it should be second nature to us to send them the right messages.

So, what about those school buses?

Some good news on this front comes in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus USA program, which is designed to “reduce children’s exposure to diesel exhaust and the amount of air pollution created by diesel school buses.” Clean School Bus USA is one of a number of federal and state programs that are providing grants for school-bus retrofitting and replacement to offer the approximately 24-million American children who take school buses daily a better ride. (That’s a lot of kids breathing in bus stuff for an average hour and half every day.)

The effort is beginning to pay off, most recently in Wisconsin and Ohio where a large Illinois-based school bus manufacturer has been commissioned to build 16 hybrid gasoline-electric buses for use in local school systems. The company, IC Bus, is a subsidiary of Navistar, which makes more than 60 percent of North America’s school buses and is also the recipient of recent $39 million dollar federal grant to manufacture all-electric vehicles. IC Bus is working with Enova (electric drive train) and Valance (electric propulsion) technology to deliver its CE Series hybrid bus, which is offered as a plug-in or a gas-electric without the plug-in option.

IC Bus says the series boasts 65 percent better fuel economy and a reduction of 39 percent emissions compared to the average diesel school bus. This is a big deal, kids. Those school buses cover a lot of ground. Can you say more than four billion miles a year?

Image: Andrei!

The post Busing 2010: School of Hybrid appeared first on EcoSalon.

When Woody Guthrie sang of redwood forests and diamond deserts in “This Land is Your Land”, his lyrics suggested his roaming and rambling was entirely on foot. But the reality is that the United States is so vast and diverse that these days, motorized transport of some kind is needed for serious exploration.

When I first moved to California, one of the first things I did was learn to drive. I do not own a car and I am happy with a bicycle and public transport within San Francisco, but I wanted to be able to rent a car to go on road trips out of town. Now despite efforts to make the great American road trip a tad greener, I am not kidding myself that this is an eco option. The most I can say about it is that it’s better than flying. I would prefer to get around by train like I did in Europe but this is not always possible – railway lines don’t go everywhere and the trains are slow. How else would I see Yosemite and Big Sur and Death Valley and Mendocino – and that’s just in my state alone?

It turns out there are options. I stand by my decision to get my driving license – it’s an important life skill that everyone should have under their belts, and I had dallied long enough. But I now know there are ways to get around the state, even in car-loving California. Green Tortoise Adventure Travel Company is based right here in my home city of San Francisco. They run tours all over the country, even up to Alaska in summer, and also down to Mexico and Central America.

This is not your typical bus tour. Green Tortoise bills itself as an eco-friendly, socially conscious company and if nothing else, one bus for 40 people is certainly a greener way to travel than plane or car. The trips go into some beautiful wilderness areas and there is plenty of time for hiking and bonding with nature. The seats on the bus convert flat into beds so you can sleep on the bus, or on non-travel nights, either put up a tent outside or sleep under the stars. Everyone pitches in to cook vegetarian meals and clean and any rubbish is shipped back out again. The atmosphere is a bit like a youth hostel on wheels – there was a wide range of age groups on the trip I took in March, but I’m told the crowd skews younger in summer when college is out.

My husband and I took a Green Tortoise trip to Death Valley. The highlight for me was the hike from Zabriskie Point down through Golden Canyon – an other-worldly landscape of rock formations in different shades of red and gold and green. I also loved visiting Badlands – salt flats purportedly at the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere that, unusually, had water in them so we could see the salt crystals forming. Over three days we also visited sand dunes, a date ranch, hot springs, and a ghost town.

It was such a great way to see this part of the state – the amount of driving involved was really too much for a new driver like me, and flying seems like such a waste of resources. This way we got taken there and shown around and we got to meet a bunch of great people. We spent a night getting to Death Valley, camped at Furnace Creek Campground for two nights, and spent another night getting back home. We arrived in San Francisco just in time to see the sunrise over Oakland and pink dawn skies over the city from Treasure Island.

I would certainly do this again and also recommend it as an option for visitors to the U.S as a way to avoid the hassles of rental cars and, for some, driving on the wrong side of the road. This land might not be my land, but I hope to tread lightly on it as I look around.

The author traveled anonymously and paid for the trip in full. Photos by the author with all rights reserved.

The post Exploring America, Eco Style: My Trip to Death Valley appeared first on EcoSalon.