"My vision is a clean world, where everybody is using clean energy”. Guy Nègre´s dream seems to come true in the future. The French engine designer wants to supply the whole world with the cheapest commodity in the world – compressed air.
AIR! Can you imagine?
Ok, the idea ist not completely new. Already in 1860 compressed air was used for huge drills to build up a tunnel between France and Italy.
While in Europe they still working and testing on prototyps, India kicks it off.
Last year India’s largest automaker, Tata Motors, announced to start producing the world’s first commercial air-powered vehicle. This summer about 6000 Air Cars are scheduled to hit the streets in India.

The Air Car uses a motor powered by compressed air. The uniqueness about the so called City Cat is its claim to offer zero emissions at the tailpipe without batteries or hydrogen fuel. Just to make it clear: Zero (0!) emissions. Even a dog has more emissions at the “pipeline”!The Air Cars can be refueled at “Air Stations”. Filling up the car’s carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air takes about two minutes and costs only around $2 (!). Ok, in India that almost a monthly salary, but for us it`s like a can of beer. With a speed about 68 mph the City Cats have a range of 125 miles.
Deals have been signed to bring the Air Cars to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.
So, is the CATvolution really taking over and saving the world from a climate catastrophe?! Or is it just a drop in a bucket and should we rather banish cows from the grassland?Watch the report about the air car on BBC:
Images: hybridarenews.org

She is one of Germany`s most renowned actresses: Martina Gedeck earned her outstanding reputation in movies like the Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others” or “Bella Martha”. She is noted for her careful choice of roles and her sincere screen incarnations of characters – which she impressively demonstrates again as Ulrike Meinhof and Clara Schumann in movies coming up this year.When it comes to environmental matters, Martina Gedeck is no less sincere, as she told us when we met her at the Brandenburger Hof Hotel in Berlin. This is one of the reasons why she gave us her testimonial about the BMW Hydrogen 7 which she used for several months. Watch our video interview!

News Checker this week comes from all corners of the globe.
Being independently mobile and flexible with our work environments is becoming even more necessary. The solar desk is another “bright” idea to create instant energy and power provided for working on the move.

Image of the Solar Workspace
Wired magazine has an interesting report on LA and its automobile industry. With the region's growing population, the city will not be able to support itself without future investments in transportation. Read more in their blogs.
More transport troubles in the USA, this time the focus is on New York's public transport system.
Full of solutions, the Dutch as usual have come up with a novel way to deal with rising water levels. Floating Homes. But unlike the usual Dutch house-boats, these homes are able to be both attached to the ground or float upwards of 16 feet. 37 houses along the Maas River in Holland have been designed by Dura Vermeer.
More info at Cleantechnica

Dutch Floating Homes

The Vulcan project is creating waves in the blogosphere. The video created by the team at the Purdue University is actually an interactive map of the United States and the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. The results are surprising.
Finally, Australia is about to build their biggest solar plant near the town of Mildura.
The plant – which is planned to begin generating power by 2010, and be completed 2013 – is looking to provide solar power to some 45,000 homes.

In the future, water and its “by-product” hydrogen will play a vital role in any city’s infrastructure. That’s if the design from Californian Architects Iwamotoscott, for the History Channel’s City of the Future competition is anything to go by.
The competition asked architects to envision and design a city 100 years from now.Iwamotoscott's concept and design for "Hydro-Net" came first in the San Francisco section of the competition. They are now up against the winners from EDAW/Praxis 3/BNIM/Metcalf and Eddy (Atlanta) and Beyer Blinder Belle (Washington). The voting by the public ends Monday, April 28th. All competitors had only one week to envision what their city might look like in 100 years, a mere 3 hours to construct their models, and just 15 minutes to present their vision to the judging panel.If this sounds unbelievable, have a look at our slide show. Here you can see their model and Iwamotoscott’s plans for Hydro-Net, as real as they can be at the moment anyway.

What is Hydro-Net City?

By taking into account the natural evolution of San Francisco, HYDRO -NET actually takes advantage of the rising water levels of the Californian coastline.
A whole new “Aquaculture zone” will be used to grow algae, which in turn will produce the hydrogen fuel used to power the city. This fuel is then stored and distributed through a series of underground tunnels made from “nanotube wall structures”. Tests have shown that carbon nanotubes, 50,000 times narrower than a human hair, can be a promising material for hydrogen storage. Out of this new watery city, emerge tall sinuous towers, where the algae is stored to produce hydrogen.
Traffic consists of hydrogen-fuelled hover –cars, which travel underneath the city. These cars also collect, store and distribute the water and power tapped from liquid and geothermal sources beneath San Francisco.

The speech by Craig Venter about synthesizing life at this year’s TED conference was just one of more than seventy that will soon be uploaded onto the TED site.
Speaking about “fourth generation designer fuels” and the capacity to reboot organisms with different DNA structures, his talk provoked both visions of a Frankenstein future, and a realistic solution to the effects of peak fuels. Venter pushed the possibility of being able to create biofuels and most importantly, fuels that actually use C02 as a foodstock. Uses for his synthetic species include replacing the petro-chemical industry and becoming a major source of energy.
Watch Craig Venter TED talk here.
For an idea of who was there , a mini picture gallery is also now online.For other talks from TED, with real pioneers in many fields, keep checking the TED website.
Title image of TED curator Chris Anderson and Steve Venter from www.ted.com

Pioneer Matthias Hollwich addressed the audience at TED 2008 with a powerful talk on the city of the future - MEtreePOLIS.Hollwich and Marc Kushner formed HWKN together in New York and explore ideas of econic design in their work.As part of the Future City competition for the History Channel, they won the IBM Engineering Innovation Award.Watch the video of their talk here.

Just a little Newschecker this week, to let you know what mobility tidbits caught our eye! Human generators have been a hot topic on Club of Pioneers lately, such as the Sustainable Dance Floor and Archinode Gym. The next great idea is brought to us by the wonderful Next Nature website. “The Knee Generator” is a knee brace created by Bionic Power Inc that can be used to charge small devices; the 5-watt electricity output from one knee generator is enough to power 10 cellphones at once! Watch a video here.And while this may be a vision for our future, even stranger are the visions of the future from the past. In 1958 the Disneyland TV program ran an episode called "Magic Highway, U.S.A." It examined the past, present and (paleo)future of transportation.In this video on Youtube you can see what people believed would happen to America's highways and cities. It's retro at its best!