Out-of-the-Bottle Thinking?

As if the loss of market share and pre-eminent status to Toyota wasn't enough humiliation for Detroit's Big Three. Here's further proof that the world's largest car-makers - who've enjoyed iconic status in pop-culture and in industry for decades - are in danger of forever being relegated to the scrapheap of un-coolness.

The car on the left is the Loremo (Hat-tip to Caderageous) - a "green"vehicle in race-car disguise. Apparently it can get 145 miles (and multiple exclamation marks!!!) per gallon. And its going to be available not 20 or 10 or 5 years from now. Its hitting the markets next year. And it costs only about $22,000 - not that much more than a fully loaded Honda Civic and several thousand dollars cheaper than what my Prius cost me. Click here to learn more about the car.

The Detroit Three can't even complain of being left behind by disruptive new technology - the Loremo is NOT a hybrid (though a hybrid version may be in development). Its NOT a hydrogen car. It runs on diesel - you know that high-tech new-fangled fuel thats powered trucks and tractors for eons. The efficiency comes from "engine efficiency, low weight, and minimal drag to boost the fuel-efficiency". Wow - who would've thought that those things could ever work.

The power of the Loremo is really in the breaking of the mental barrier around fuel-efficiency, the barrier which said that 45mpg was about as good as it gets. The Loremo could be the Roger Bannister of the automotive industry. Now that one car has gotten more than 100mpg - I wouldn't be surprised if every automaker worth their salt comes up with several more super-high efficiency models like this.

Of course, the other potential loser in this case in the long run is the oil industry. While this isn't disruptive technology, its impact could definitely be disruptive. Whats going to happen to all those billions of dollars being spent by the oil industry on exploration and millions of tons of new refining capacity? You'd be surprised how quickly car populations can get replaced in cost-conscious countries - which includes nearly every nation from the US to India and China. The days of ExxonMobil's $40bn in profits might soon be over - a quintupling of fuel-efficiency would definitely slow or reduce oil demand and prices.

Of course - its much too early to celebrate the end of oil (or the arrival of a powerful tool in the fight against global warming) - the Loremo may yet mysteriously develop design flaws or have safety concerns raised about it, or it may be bought out by competitors who may or may not deem it to be a viable project to pursue. But heck - its Friday evening - always a good time to pick up that beer-stein and cheer on an idea that has taken way too much time to arrive.

And one that seems to be the outcome of some great out-of-the-bottle thinking :)

FREE Monthly Bulbs Giveaway: Make-The-Switch

I’m starting a FREE Monthly GiveAway of Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulbs where I shall give away 16 energy saving CFLs with a 23 Watt output (equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb) to who-ever requests it - friend, foe, stranger. Every month.

Here's why: I’ve only recently gotten around to replacing all the light bulbs in my house with energy-saving CFLs...even though I’ve known about their great energy saving impact for a few months now. It wasn’t about affordability - PG&E is selling them for 50 cents a piece!! The delay happened simply because replacing incandescent bulbs that were still working was just not very top-of-the-mind for me and so I’d forget to buy them. If you're like me and lazy, not sure if you’ll like CFLs or just plain can’t remember to go buy them, this is your chance to Make-The-Switch and green-light your home. Click here or on the permanent link on the side-bar for more details

If you've already made the switch dear reader, feel free to refer your friends to this offer.

Urban Pools of Meltwater

"While there have always been meltwater pools. There are many more of them covering a far larger area of ice....This meltwater is now believed to keep sinking all the way down to the bottom, cutting deep crevasses and vertical tunnels called 'moulins'. When the water reaches the bottom of the ice, it lubricates the surface of the bedrock and destabilizes the ice mass raising fears that the ice mass will slide more quickly towards the ocean"

- Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore was talking about innocuous looking pools of melted ice (meltwater) that have been spreading across the surface of Greenland. The adjoining picture is NOT Niagara Falls; its meltwater flowing into a deep moulin. How deep is the moulin? Well, the tiny black dots at the top of the picture are actually people.

While ice-sheets already formed on the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans are also breaking away and melting, this does not raise sea levels. Meltwater on the Greenland's landmass is significant because it may help huge chunks of land-based ice to slide into the sea which WOULD raise the sea levels.

I believe that metaphorical meltwater pools have also formed in urban Indian society...that has an equally large potential to change the climate in India - in this case, the social one. Unlike global warming, this climate change is likely bring positive change to most people's lives (even if they don't think so themselves :)

The meltwater pools can be found in places like Buzz in Delhi where young couples dance, smoke, drink and kiss in abandon every weekend night...or for example in Mocha in Bombay - where packs of barely-teened girls and boys spend horrendous number of hours and huge amounts of deep-pocket money on melted-Lindt hot chocolate and green-apple flavored hookahs.

The signs of climate change are everywhere. Here's a few examples:
a) Rising divorce rates (specially amongst the under-35 age-group) - Ask yourself how many divorced friends your parents had and how many divorced wonderful friends you do
b) Falling rates of pre-marital virginity. The perceived virginity rate in the eyes of parents is probably still at its 1960s level - I know many many couples who've lived-in in India but almost no parents who knew about it :)
c) The laissez faire attitude...fancy way of saying live-and-let-live...of most of my friends and relatives to my coming out. "But even then, why do you have to move to the U.S." I was asked a couple of times. Or the increasing number of gay nights in Delhi - at last count it had doubled to 2! - each, I believe, well-attended.
d) The increasing number of kissing scenes in Hindi films - even Ash did it...yes Amitabh, she did it and even if its cut from the theatre runs of Dhoom2 its probably already on Youtube for eternity. I do think though, that Ash kissing-in-movies is like Microsoft bundling IE with Windows - its a free gift that people didn't expect and thats designed to put wannabes like Mallika Sherawat (or poor Netscape) out of business

Sceptics will argue that there was always a tiny Page-3-population that lived like they were in Malibu rather than Mumbai - I think the difference is that:
a) The people swimming in the thawed meltwater pools today, are overwhelmingly middle class - not the upper-class people Shobha De famously wrote about
b) They don't regard themselves as social revolutionaries unlike the 1960's (1970's in India)
Flower-Power generation - the increasingly blase attitude towards sex, divorce, marriage etc is truly subversive - one that is likely to infect contemporaries in smaller towns, as well as younger siblings, kids and nephews/nieces who are now growing up. Quiet creeping revolution is more difficult to put down than bus-window-shattering protests

I, of course, selfishly applaud the omens of a new social climate - it may allow me to have a dating scene based in Delhi/Bombay before I'm 80 and can't dance anymore.

But there are others who should be worried. Human action has led to the drying up of the Aral Sea (Yeah really - the whole sea literally evaporated into thin air) and left shipping fleets stuck in the sand (see adjoining picture).

Indian conservative political parties - the ones that tend to riot on Valentine's Day - may find themselves similarly left stranded by the wayside along with their Ice Age ideas - if they don't change with the