FuelFrog Makes It Easy To Keep Track Of How Much You’re Being Bent Over At The Pump

I’ve recently caught the hyper-miler bug. Hyper-milers drive their cars in a way that eeks out crazy high milage, sometimes upwards of 100 miles per gallon with non-hybrid cars. Hyper-milers accelerate slowly, using a feather touch on the gas and try to keep all momentum going- hitting the brakes is a waste of speed and a waste of gas. Drafting on big rigs on the highway can squeeze in a few percentage points of efficiency and the really serious hyber-milers look for places to turn off their engines to coast, which is actually not a smart idea- the power steering and braking in modern cars shut down when you turn it off, dropping into neutral is a slightly less efficient but way more safe technique.

FuelFrog is a web app that easily keeps track of your gas mileage- a hyper-milers dream come true, and pretty damn cool for the rest of you too. It’s super simple to use- you just enter in the miles traveled since your last fill up and the amount and price of the gas you got. After a few fillups FuelFrog gives you stats on how much road you’re getting out of your gas in an easy to read web 2.0y graph. I just signed up for my account (as you can see above) so my graph has no data to populate yet.

You can enter the information in via the web or by using Twitter, which would allow you to do it as you are at the station paying. That’s a great feature for those of us who would suck at faithfully entering in the info back at home.

I love seeing stuff like this- great mashups of green, technology, mobile devices, and the internet. Maybe we can work ourselves out of the eco-hole we’ve dug into.

Link [FuelFrog] via [ReadWriteWeb]

Fsck Your Hummer, And His Hummer, and Her Hummer, and That Hummer Over by the Tree

10 Miles Per Gallon…
2 Soldiers a Day.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. FUCKYOURHUMMER.com doesn’t mince word:

Welcome to FUCKYOURHUMMER.COM. This site is being set up as on omage to vandalized hummers. Whether it is a hard to peel off bumper sticker, slashed tires, keying, spray painted… we want to have your pictures of it! WHY you might ask? This grotesque monster of an SUV is a symbol that says “I could give a shit about the enviroment, wars over oil, global warming, energy independance, or any number of other issues.” You are the epitomy of stupid americans, and make the rest of us look like assholes. Some of us in this country actually do give a shit. Now I hope others will force you to give a shit.

While we don’t condone scratching up your neighbor’s Hummer, it’s hard for us to muster up any sympathy for the “victims” of such an act. Hummers are teh suck.

Link [FUCKYOURHUMMER]

Get Out Your Bicycles! Gas is Heading to $7 a Gallon

Jeff Rubin, a leading economist at CIBC World Markets, has a message for us all: start thinking about alternate transportation. In 4 years, gas prices will likely hit $7-$10 per gallon, making it too expensive for many people.

Treehugger has it:

“Stripping out natural gas liquids, oil production has not grown for over two years, which certainly goes a long way to explaining why oil prices have doubled over that period,” Rubin said. “It is increasingly clear that the outlook for oil supply signals a period of unprecedented scarcity.”

Rubin predicts hybrids will go “from marketing and PR fluff to the core of car production.” People will move closer to where they work. “I think there will be fewer people on the road in North America in five years than there is right now.”

Seems to me as if now is the time for cities all over America to start planning better public transit systems, since not all of us have the luxury of living close enough to walk or ride a bike to our places of work, grocery stores and other essential destinations - and the poor probably won’t be able to make that move. Let’s hope that the powers that be take this seriously.

The good news is, prices like this will definitely get more people to trade in their ridiculous look-at-me gas guzzlers in for something a little more reasonable. I’d venture to guess that we’ll be seeing less Hummers on the road, and I for one am happy about that, because my egg-throwing arm is getting tired.

Link [Treehugger]

Photo credit: Flickr user Brianfit

EarthFirst Blog Week in Review: March 10th - 14th

It was another busy last week here at the EarthFirst blog. We covered samurai swords, expensive green washed handbags, big business green hijinks by GM and Wal-Mart, expensive gas, the green Pope, “clean coal” crap, and toilet paper. We’ve nailed down the design for the new template which we’ll be rolling out in a few weeks. It looks great and we’re really excited to show it to our readers. Happy reading!

Have you subscribed to our RSS Feed? Why the hell not!?! Get on it already.

• Grocery Bills Soar as Retail Food Prices Spiral Up
• The War on Iraq is Costing $4,000 a Second, or About $120,000 in the Time It Took to Write This Headline
• Global Warming Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Gets Warmer Everywhere All The Time
• Rant: Shut the F*&% Up About High Gas Prices
• Animals vs. Humans: Humanity Gets Pwned
• The Vatican Declares that Polluting the Earth is Now a Sin
• The Three Ingredient Vegan Junk Food You’ve Probably Been Eating for Years
• EcoGeek Kills “Clean Coal” Ad and Calls Them Out for the Greenwash
• Florida Senator Pushing Bill to Require Restaurants to Have “Enough” Toilet Paper on Roll
• GM CEO Rick Wagoner: Vice Chairman Bob Lutz Doesn’t Speak for GM on Global Warming
• Doggie Style Commute: Ride the Bitch Cruiser to Not-Safe-for-Work
• Coal- Cheap. Abundant. Cheap.
• What is RSS and How Can It Make My Life Better?
• Want to Create Jobs? Invest in Education and Mass Transit
• A $360 Cardboard Bag Coated with Water-Resistant Spray with a Leather Handle is NOT Green
• The Friday Video Round Up: Will Ferrell, Big Angry Fat Guys, Al Gore, and the Hummer Hybrid
• Wal-Mart CEO is a Master of the Obvious: Our Company is Not Green
• Japan Steel Works- Builds 600 Ton Parts for Nuclear Power Plants and Samurai Swords
• Eco-Fail! HGTV’s Green Home Giveaway and The Yukon Hybrid

Five Dollar Gas Plus is The New Reality- Time to Hybrid Up

$5/gallon gas in Gordo, California. Welcome to the new reality.

Link [San Luis Obispo]

Photo Credit: Flickr user Momo The Monster

Rant: Shut the F*&% Up About High Gas Prices

Violent Acres has a great rant about gas prices. Here’s a snip:

If one more person complains to me about the rising gas prices, I’m going to snap and break his fucking kneecaps.

Every morning, when I check the mail, my neighbor gives me a little wave and makes some disparaging comment about how the gas prices are killing him. And every morning, I want to ram his fucking newspaper right down his fucking throat because he’s the first person to hop in his car to drive to the corner store that is less than 1 mile away.

Fuck him. And fuck anyone else who wants to bitch and moan about gas prices, but can’t be bothered to take a walk. Or ride a bike. Or walk into their place of employment and say, “Hey guys, I was thinking about organizing a carpool. Anyone interested?”

Head over to Violent Acres and read the whole thing, it’s a good one.

Link [Violent Acres]

Great Flying Spaghetti Monster! Look at Those Gas Prices!

In spite of my noble belief that $4/gallon gas is good for our country, I can’t help but wistfully remember the day back in the 90’s when I filled up my little Jetta for less than a tenner on $.67/gallon gas in one of the southern states. Hell, right now even $1.59 sounds like it’s from a dreamland. A dreamland full of cheap gas and crashed airplanes.

Via [Frostfirezoo]

Higher Gas Prices + Road Congestion = Greener Mass Transit

Is everyone else just getting killed by gas prices? I can’t believe how short a distance $20 in gas now gets me. I work from home and don’t drive much and I’m still hating the wallet gouging the gas pump is digging me for. I know gas is never going to be cheap again and the whole situation has prompted me to make some big life changes.

First, me and my family are moving into downtown Portland, Maine. We moved back east a few years ago and have been living in the rural just north of the city of 100,000. Over the past few months we realized that we were sick of driving everywhere and sick of the money it cost us to do so. We’ll be moving to Portland’s West End, a cool old money section of town that is smack dab next to just about anything you’d want to walk to on the city’s peninsula. I’m getting an electric skateboard and downsizing my car.

Grist’s Ryan Avent points out that oil prices are at an all time high in real terms. Gas prices peak during the summer so it’s likely a lot of the country could see $4/gallon gas come June. He hopes the higher prices combine with hassles of congestion will spur our investment and focus on clean mass transit. He has it:

If new infrastructure primarily comes in the form of new lane miles, then congestion reduction will only be temporary; eventually, developers will respond to the new investments by building along the new capacity — that is, outward. In the space of a few years, the congestion benefits will be erased, and with no reduction in vehicle miles traveled or emissions, since increased efficiency may well be canceled out by longer commutes. Critically, exposure to higher fuel costs will remain.

If, however, congestion is addressed by the implementation of congestion pricing, along with significant investments in high-capacity rail service, both inter- and intracity, then efforts to clear the nation’s arteries will also yield reductions in emissions and miles traveled, and the addition of automobile alternatives will make it easier for commuters to substitute away from driving when gas costs soar.

We’re going to spend a lot of money on infrastructure in the near future. It is critical that we use that money to maximum good effect. New highways will bring little to no long-term return on investment. If we’re going to spend, we should spend smart.

As much as higher gas prices hurt my individual pocket, it could be a very effective way to push things in a smarter, greener way. Let’s hear it for $5/gallon!

Link [Gristmill]