US auto industry's fuel efficiency has stalled: it's time to restart the engine

Conflicted approaches to energy use - I want it, but I want it cheap - are rife and sit alongside a lack of joined up thinking.

Here's just one, small example, of a lack of integrated and strategic thinking at municipal level.
San Francisco prides itself on being a "green city". It adopted a plan in 2007 to commit the city to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2012.  Its recycling rate at 77%  diversion from landfill and zero emission trolley buses powered by clean electricity from the  Hetchy Hetchy dam are laudable. But claims of being a green city by world standards are far-fetched.

SF Park, which manages parking spaces in the city, has developed a fantastic new real-time data service for iPhones which will tell you where the free spaces are in the city. I spoke to the project manager at the recent Transportation Camp in San Francisco. He told me that the app scheme cost $20m of federal dollars from the Federal Highways Department. But parking will now cost from as little as 50c an hour off peak and will, as he admitted, encourage people to drive into the city centre if they can be sure of finding a parking space more easily.

California wins SunShot dollars while GOP trains sights on clean energy

Californian companies did exceptionally well out of Steven Chu’s “SunShot” announcement on Friday to award $27m to nine companies in the US to drive down the cost of solar. And as Vice President Joe Biden announces $53bn for high speed rail today, it looks like Barack Obama is following through with his clean energy commitments made in his "Sputnik" state of the union.

The US energy secretary announced details of the Department of Energy's SunShot initiative to reduce the cost of photovoltaic solar energy systems by about 75% by 2020, to $1 a watt.

SunShot will focus on four areas:

• Technologies for solar cells and arrays that convert sunlight to energy;
• Electronics that optimize the performance of the installation;
• Improvements in the efficiency of solar manufacturing processes;
• Installation, design and permitting for solar energy systems.