DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ latest campaign points out a stunningly offensive advertising claim from the auto industry: “Autos made today are virtually emission-free.”

As with most environmental-impact statements made by big industries (and, in fact, the Bush Administration), there’s a nugget of truth used to disguise the ugly reality. The truth is that in lab testing, the average car today runs cleaner than the average car of 30 years ago. But the ugly reality is that we’re still in much worse shape than ever before.

According to a 1996 study, EPA lab tests show a 96% reduction in vehicle emissions since the mid-1960s. However:

[C]ars in actual use emitted only 75 percent less CO and HC, while Americans drove twice as many miles per year — resulting in a roughly 50-percent net drop in actual auto emissions. Vehicle travel is growing so rapidly that the trend of decreasing total emissions could reverse without additional regulatory steps.

The Auto Alliance’s claim is a smart marketing ploy. Telling consumers their vehicles are “virtually emission-free” seems to remove the auto industry from any discussion about environmental toxins. But in fact the auto industry should be at the center of any discussion about environmental toxins. According to a consortium of environmental groups, “Burning gasoline in cars and trucks is responsible for 27 percent of global warming pollution in the U.S.”

How do you get from being “virtually emission-free” to being responsible for 27% of global warming pollution? That’s not a question the Auto Alliance is likely to answer. In my opinion, the Auto Alliance is guilty of greenscamming. They’d like new car buyers to feel good about emission levels, when in fact auto emissions are still a major source of toxic pollution. The Auto Alliance’s ad ignores these factors:

• There are more cars on the road than ever before.
  
• People keep cars longer than ever before.
  
• People drive more miles per year than ever before.
  

So, in summary, new cars run cleaner than old cars, but there are more old cars on the road, and more total cars on the road, and everybody drives further than they used to.

Add to that the fact that overall fleet fuel economy is in decline. It’s counter-intuitive — reduced emissions implies better fuel economy, you might think — but the fuel efficiency of our national vehicle fleet peaked in 1988 and is now lower than it was 10 years ago.

Add to that the fact that although there are more models of SULEV and PZEV vehicles available, 24% of all vehicles sold in the US are SUVs. Although there are SULEV SUVs coming on the market, how many years will it be before they’ve penetrated the market sufficiently to have an impact on either overall fleet fuel efficiency or emissions?

The bottom line is that the Auto Alliance has picked out one partial truth and used it in a way that misleads consumers, to their own ill health.

The UCS provides a convenient mechanism for responding: Petition the FCC to investigate the Auto Alliance claim and issue appropriate sanctions.

The UCS provides a convenient summary of the problem, including scary statistics on C0₂ emissions from automobiles, on the main campaign page: Automakers Pollute the Press

I’ll be attending O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego next week. Ping me if you’re going, so I know to look at my feet when I pass you in the hallway.

The menu preferences section of the registration form made me laugh. It’s not as granola as some of the menus I’ve seen before, but it’s a lot more functional. The choices are:

• Vegetarian/Vegan
• Kosher
• Life Threatening Food Allergy
• Other: ___________

I checked the first box, because I couldn’t fit the 320 words that describe my current dietary restrictions onto the “other” line. We’ll see what happens. If the food’s any good, maybe I’ll be mealblogging the entire conference.

The weekend Chron ran an interesting article about residential cave-building in Napa.

[Caves make] aesthetic as well as economic sense. A bare-bones cave can be built for about one-third the square-foot price of a wood-framed addition. And, when construction is finished, the land appears untouched.

So now I’m having visions of a subterranean recording studio. I’d miss having a view, but installing windows is the worst thing you can do to a soundproof wall. Then again, the echoes in a round stone room would be ferocious. Hmm, there would be trade-offs. I suppose if I end up wood-framing a square room inside the cave, I haven’t really saved any money on the construction.

Vegan fine dining. There aren’t too many restaurants fitting that description, and none of them, I’d wager, can touch Eric Tucker’s Millennium for consistently wild explosions of flavor. I inhaled the five-course Chef’s Tasting Menu last night. This is the closest I’ve come to culinary nirvana since I ate at the French Laundry.

Upon arrival, we were led to a white-linen-draped table in the center of rectangular dining room. I had a vision of our three-month-old losing it in the middle of a crowd of suit-and-tie power-vegans on their way to the theater. The hostess read my mind. With a smile toward the baby, she asked, “Would you prefer to sit in a booth?”

Raphael is in fact amazingly tolerant of both travel and fancy dining experiences, but rather than invite disaster we take some precautions where we can. We followed the hostess to a series of booths against a wall on the other side of the bar, grateful for the relative isolation.

The decor in booth-land is spare. The tabletops look like corrugated cardboard. The booths looked like there used to be a train station next door. We had no placemats or tablecloth. We’d descended from “fine dining” to “fine diner.” The only adornment that stood out was this lone salt shaker, remarkable in my mind for two reasons: one, there was no matching pepper shaker. And two, in an upscale restaurant, shouldn’t the seasonings be pretty much perfect already? I’d guess that if a dish at the French Laundry were served needing salt, the line cook would be disciplined in the storeroom with a dry Italian salame.

The service started out cool, but warmed over time as we gushed over each new dish. Still, there were odd moments. Early in the meal my wife left the table briefly. When this happened at Roxanne’s, the waiter swooped down and replaced the napkin. Excessive, I thought, but very high class. At Millennium, the waiter took her napkin from the table, but instead of replacing it, he folded it and put it back! Ewww. It’s illogical, but that seems sort of unhygienic.

The Chef’s Tasting Menu is a five-course event: two appetizers, two “tasting portions” from the list of entrees, plus a dessert sampler. They supplement this with an “intermezzo” course of sorbet (blood-orange and mango), and a bonus starter, the soup of the day. The kitchen staff makes the selections, although they’ll accomodate special requests. They didn’t duplicate any courses: between the two of us, we tasted over half of the menu:

1. Golden Lentil Soup with Fennel
2. Roasted Beets
3. Exotic Mushroom sauté, grilled bruschetta with truffled sun-dried tomato butter
4. Warm Spinach Salad: lemongrass marinated & grilled tofu, grilled oyster mushrooms, fresh grapefruit, sesame seeds, tamarind-grapefruit vinaigrette
5. Spring Lasagnette (raw!): celery root “pasta” sheets, sun-dried tomato / pine nut “ricotta,” shaved fennel & white asparagus salad, spring herb pesto, fennel-Seville orange puree
6. Seared Hazelnut Risotto Cake: sauté of corona beans, seitan chorizo & winter kale, roasted black chanterelles & exotic mushrooms, chimichurri
7. Mung Bean Sprout & Scallion Crepé: sauté of Asian vegetables, marinated seitan, shiitake mushrooms, Thai style red coconut curry sauce, pineapple-kumquat sambal
8. Pecan Crusted Portobello: creamy roasted garlic polenta, sauté of mixed chicories & black olive-leek confit, syrah reduction, gypsy pepper cream, black truffle oil
9. Masa Verde Cake: black lentil, huitlacoche & pozole stew with root vegetables & chile negro, pumpkin seed emulsion, avocado salsa
10. Pastry Platter

At the French Laundry, Thomas Keller turned five courses into eight, via the surprise starters, supplemental desserts, and, if I had to guess, the six sticks of butter in every dish. We rolled out of there clutching our bellies and groaning. Maybe they overfeed everyone to take the sting out of the bill. Seriously, for $150/person, you’d better be full.

Although Millennium charges 50% less for their tasting menu than the French Laundry does, I felt like overeating should be the diner’s option. I’d come hungry. Halfway through the Pecan Crusted Portobello, the few synapses of my brain not completely overloaded with the magic happening in my mouth were thinking, “umm, there’s more food coming, right?”

When the waiter came to clear the dishes, I told him as much. “Everything was wonderful,” I said, and with an air of resignation and even guilt, like I’d let him down, I added “but I’m still hungry.”

I’m a bad vegan. My wife and I split eight plates of food and two bowls of soup, and I was still thinking I could put away a couple more dishes. So much for having a small ecological footprint.

I ordered a seventh course, Tandoori Spice Glazed Tofu Skewers with Israeli Couscous. The waiter delivered it about three minutes later with the message that it would be “on the house” — “we hate to see anyone go away hungry,” he said. Good policy. Good tofu. Good couscous too.

My favorite dish came early in the meal. It seemed innocuous enough, just a simple piece of bread spread with “sun-dried tomato butter” — far from the fanciest dish on the table — but when I bit into it my jaw dropped open and the backside of my skull flew off. For presentation, it can’t touch Thomas Keller’s signature amuse, the Cornet of Salmon Tartare with Sweet Red Onion Creme Fraiche, but in contrast to that mindblowing flavor bomb, this is something I might actually make at home.

All the dishes were superb. The presentation was awesome: incredible contrasts of color, texture, and taste. It was a full-tongue workout, with no spare hooves and horns to dispose of at the end of the meal.

It’s interesting that Millennium does not advertise itself as a vegan restaurant. I can imagine a few reasons for this, and I can’t imagine too many vegetarians complaining about the lack of eggs and cheese on the menu. In any case, I’m happy Millennium is as successful as it is, and I plan to return there soon.

Bim forwarded a link to Mobile PC Magazine’s Top 100 Gadgets of All Time. I was immediately enveloped in warm waves of nostalgia: Rubik’s Cube (#89)! Pong (#70)! Lite-Brite! (#77)

I make a pretty lousy technophile though. I’ve only owned about five of the top 100 (Pez (#98) and Etch-a-Sketch (#50) are the other two). I’ve owned more-recent versions of the Leatherman (#67) and Cuisinart (#69). And I used to sit in the window of Radio Shack to hack on the TRS-80, which ought to count for something.

The Commodore 64 should have been on this list. It was “the” Christmas gift, whatever year that was, just as Pong had been a few years before. But maybe I’m just embarassed that I’m generally too suspicious and/or oblivious to be an early gadget adopter, and I’m grubbing for points.

One of the item descriptions in the list contains a reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… did you spot it?