The Gas Guzzler configuration

Before sales begin for the model year, fuel economy values are calculated using a formula that weights fuel economy test results for city and highway driving cycles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The mileage is calculated based on the averages of city and highway miles traveled — 55% city driving and 45% highway driving. Those models that fail to meet the minimum fuel economy level of 22.5 mpg are penalized. Again, this does not include minivans, sport utility vehicles or pickup trucks.

The penalty

Congress did not impose a Gas Guzzler Tax on certain vehicle types (for example, large family vans), because in 1978, they were not widely used. It may sound silly today, but 32 years ago, when the law was passed, larger vehicles were used more for business purposes than for personal transportation.

The tax is collected by the IRS to the manufacturer or importer. The window sticker on new cars will tell you the tax paid (if applicable) on the vehicle’s fuel economy label. The amount penalized is according to how low the fuel economy goes.

The penalties (rates effective since 1991) are below (from the EPA website):

The vehicles charged the tax are listed on the site each year. Models include the Mercedes Benz CL600 and the Nissan M45x. Curious? Here are the 2009 cars subject to the tax.

What it means to us to have fuel-efficient cars

While the tax doesn’t directly affect us, some consumers want to be rewarded for choosing cars that are more conservative with gas consumption. In a poll conducted by a transportation researcher at San Jose State University, Californians support the idea of charging vehicle fees for cars that are not environmentally friendly.

Proposed consequences include higher taxes for gas guzzlers and discounts for less-polluting vehicles. The biggest kickback proposed? Rebates of up to $1,000 for fuel-efficient cars and a surcharge of up to $2,000 for gas hogs.

For now, the choice remains a personal one; a pledge to the environment isn’t always as simple as it sounds, but a movement toward efficiency is hitting the ground running. That is the good news.

Another attractive aspect of biodiesel is that it’s easily made. It’s nontoxic and does not present any healthy hazards, so it can be mixed up right in your home kitchen. For directions on how to make your own biodiesel at home, read my blog entry. It’s easy, affordable and a fun way to teach your family the invaluable practice of reusing and recycling.

Biodiesel is a win-win solution because it not only reuses unwanted cooking oils, but it is also much better for the environment:

• Biodiesel reduces toxic components that are released into the environment and have been shown to cause various types of cancers.
• Biodiesel produces 78% less greenhouse gasses (CO₂) than conventional diesel fuel.
• Biodiesel is three times more energy efficient than conventional diesel fuel. Conventional diesel fuel produces 0.89 units of energy for every unit of fuel while biodiesel produces 3.2 unites of energy for every unit of fuel.
• Biodiesel comes from the earth (primarily vegetables) so it is nontoxic and extremely biodegradable.

Although, my family and I aren’t able to create our own biodiesel just yet (we don’t have a diesel engine), when we purchase our next vehicle I’m going to make sure it is able to run on biodiesel. For people who work in the food industry or know someone who does, you may be able to acquire large amounts of used vegetable oil used for frying for free. This could virtually eliminate your financial costs of operating your vehicle. Biodiesel is a sure way to save money and save the planet.

Like many people who live in New York City, I don’t own a car. Aside from being more trouble and expense than they’re worth in a city with comprehensive public transportation, cars are, of course, major polluters. So, not only do I save myself time and money by not driving, but I can also feel good about pumping less global warming-causing carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

The times I have driven in the five years since I moved to New York have almost all been while I was on vacation. It’s made sense to rent or borrow a car while I was in places far from home — Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco and Mexico — but what about the trips I take in the Northeast? There are a ton of great vacation destinations within reasonable driving distance of New York (among them: Maine, Cape Cod, Boston and Vermont) and now that the leaves are getting close to changing, I’ve definitely starting thinking about how nice it would be to have an eco-friendly vehicle to take on road trips.

Hybrid cars like the Prius are starting to become fairly ubiquitous, but I’ve always been interested in cars that are even more radical, like those that have been converted to run on vegetable oil. Here are some things I’ve learned about veggie oil-powered vehicles:

• You can buy kits to convert a car yourself from retailers like Frybrid and Greasecar. The kits range from a few hundred dollars to about $1,000.
• If you don’t want to do the dirty work, there are also companies, such as Funhad, that specialize in converting standard vehicles to SVO (straight vegetable oil) or WVO (waste vegetable oil).
• It’s estimated that veggie oil-powered vehicles emit about half the emissions of standard vehicles.
• Most standard diesel engine cars and trucks can be easily converted to run on WVO, while some can even run on SVO without conversion. A few people have even converted buses and RVs!
• You can find vats of used vegetable oil at restaurants (Asian restaurants seem to be popular choices) and from online sources like Good Grease, which buys and sells vegetable oil to power cars, and FillUp4Free.com, which maps locations where oil is available

Pretty interesting stuff, huh? I could definitely see myself taking in the beauty of New England country roads in a car that runs on vegetable oil. It seems appropriate somehow.

Yes, it’s recovery.org, which despite its dot-org suffix, is run by a company called Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) based in Seattle, which is tracking thousands of stimulus projects at the state, county and local level, from building a transit center in Washtenaw, Michigan, to decommissioning nuclear facilities in South Carolina.

Then there’s recovery.gov, the federal site that “offers little beyond news releases, general breakdowns of spending, and acronym-laden spreadsheets and timelines,” as the Washington Post put it. But don’t worry, the government is on the case. An office set up to oversee the stimulus (with a budget of $84 million) has about 30 employees, plus outside contractors, working to revamp the site, the newspaper said. “We have four and a half years to turn this thing into its final product,” Earl E. Devaney, the former inspector general now in charge of oversight, told The Post. No, I’m not making this up.

To be sure, recovery.org and recovery.gov have different purposes. While the government side is designed for taxpayers, and intended to provide oversight of stimulus outlays, the Onvia-built site is primarily intended for small, mid-sized and big companies that want a shot at government contracts. That’s been Onvia’s business since it was founded in 1995.

Eric Gillespie, Onvia’s chief information officer, told me that the company set up recovery.org as a free website to advertise itself to potential customers. It sells the rest of its data by subscription.

“If you look at the total volume of projects that the government undertakes in a year, stimulus projects represent only about 2 percent of the total,” Gillespie told me recently by phone. (You can listen to a podcast of our conversation at Greenbiz.com.) “The other 98 percent, we keep behind the screen.”

“We cover every vertical-architecture, engineering, construction, information technology, health care, energy, renewable energy, water,” Gillespie says. “If you are a computer hardware manufacturer, and you’d like to know, for the last five years, every laptop purchase in K-12 by geography, by model and by price, we can tell you what percentage was Mac, what percentage was Lenovo, what was Dell, and you can do a lot of price sensitivity analysis around that. I can tell you the price of fuel oil that every government entity has paid, by geography, across a time line, for 10 years.

So, for example, businesses can compete to repair a “cool roof” at Edwards Air Force Base in California, install solar hot water heaters at a Department of Labor office in Miami, or provide weatherization services through the Department of Human Services in Vermont.

Those are not typical examples, as it happens. Because I’m writing for Greenbiz.com, I went looking for clean energy and environmental projects. Most of the projects, for now, appear to be road and bridge resurfacing and construction projects , perhaps because they are “shovel-ready.”

Onvia gathers its data using a combination of sophisticated and old-fashioned shoe leather. Most of it comes from data searches of the websites of state and local governments, school districts, water and sewer authorities and the like. About 89,000 government entities generate projects and requests for proposals, according to Gillespie.

Those not online are found through research, including calling government offices and reading public notices. The company has about 60 to 80 people doing research. “The only way to get that information is to get a local newspaper, scan it and plug it into the database,” Gillespie says. “We literally get hundreds of newspapers at the office.” (At least someone’s still buying papers.)

A dot-com survivor, Onvia generated about $21.1 million in revenue in 2008. The election of Barack Obama as president should drive those numbers higher.

Gillespie says: “There’s been a dramatic shift of power to D.C. with the legislation, the bailouts, everything that’s come forward in the last six months, and that helps our business.”