Fomer Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on his PHEV drive
May 26, 2006 (From the CalCars-News archive)

Tom Daschle, former Senator from South Dakota 1986-1998, Senate
Majority Leader 1994-1998, now with the Center for American Progress
was interviewed a couple of days after seeing our cars in Washington,
DC. The interview is on Eco-Talk, broadcast on Air America. The host
is Betsy Rosenberg from Eco-Talk -- Betsy is both a journalist and
founder of Don't Be Fueled: Mothers for Clean and Safe Vehicles
<http://www.dontbefueled.org>. The entire interview is worth hearing;
the segment below is at the start of part 2.
http://www.ecotalkblog.com/
http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/files/EcoTalk97-1.mp3
http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/files/EcoTalk97-2.mp3

Kick the Oil Habit

Ecotalk (host Betsy Rosenberg): We are in conversation with the
esteemed Tom Daschle talking about an OP-Ed column he wrote in the
New York Times published on May 8th in which he calls for a renewed
focus and look into renewable energies and saying that some of the
answers to our many threats, be they environmental to geopolitical,
is to really commercialize new fuel technologies in partnership with
America's farmers.

There's some controversy about the problems with quote
commercializing which has positive and negative impacts. I think the
primary concern on the part of many environmentalists is just that
supporting industrial farming practices that are harmful to human
health and our environment is not necessarily the way to go. There's
a lot of pollution involved and the creation of greenhouse gases in
our traditional agricultural process, by the way, not just specific to Ethanol.

Daschle: Well I think that we're evolving and we're not going to
reach the perfect system for a long time to come. I just drove today
a plug-in hybrid. As you know a plug-in hybrid relies even more on
the electrical power grid to generate its transportation energy and I
think that that also holds great promise. I can't imagine why the
automobile manufacturers haven't already begun marketing plug-in hybrids.

Ecotalk: Was that Felix Kramer's CalCars' plug-in hybrid Prius? Oh,
he's going to be on our show next week.

Daschle: Is he really, well he's just terrific. And he's really
devoted a great deal of time to perfect the technology and we can do
it without the involvement of auto manufacturers but it just seems to
make all the more sense for these manufacturers to do it rather than
for us to have to custom make these plug-in hybrids after the car is built.

So, Felix does a fantastic job and I actually had a chance to drive
one today and I think people would be very surprised with how
smoothly these cars run.

Ecotalk: And I got to drive that Prius as well, it says 99 miles per
gallon on the odometer.

Daschle: Now it says 100 so they've actually improved their fuel
efficiency even more since you drove it.

Ecotalk: Well they couldn't get the 100 up there but they must have
done that just in time for the trip to Washington. So I'm glad he
made it there, he was supposed to be on the show today but he was
hoping to get to D.C. so I'm glad he's connecting with the right people.

What about looking at many alternatives, a combination of renewable
sources, not just ethanol, including some solar energy infrastructure
development?

Daschle: Well Felix was telling me that his thought was that he would
put solar panels on his garage and actually use solar energy to
ultimately run his car. So it would be solar energy collected during
the day then transmitted into car during the night and ready to go
the following morning.

So, as I said this is really an exciting time in the energy field. My
feeling is that energy with all of its iterations and tremendous
potential could mean a bigger boom to the economy than all of
technology in the nineties and early turn of the century that we've
experienced already. I think there is so much potential there for
economic growth and vitality. So, we're only beginning to appreciate,
I'd say we'd not even gotten to the one or two percentage points in
terms of that potential. But it's there and we need to seize it and
everybody had a role to play and that includes policy makers.