Drama, irony, anticipation and the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dominated the closing hours of the conference today.
For anticipation, a California-based electric car company announced it is considering opening a factory in Ohio, and for drama the closing session of the conference was thrown a curve when keynote speaker Carol Browner had to cancel at the last minute.
Ironically, Browner, the assistant to President Obama for energy and climate change and former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was to discuss how transportation policy could prevent future oil disasters. Instead Obama sent her to Louisiana to deal with the real-time spill first hand.

Organizers reconstituted a new panel to take audience questions about dealing with the BP oil spill, and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown dropped by via Skype to urge conference participants to speed up the processes for finding ways to reduce U.S. dependence on oil as an energy source.

Sidewalks that end at trees, zig zag paths that go nowhere, a driver walking his dog as he drives his car and a fitness center with escalators next to the entrance steps.

Those slides, which clearly present some of the clunkier energy issues in our culture, popped up in a presentation from Geoffrey Anderson, president and CEO, Smart Growth America, at the morning conference plenary “Paving the Road Ahead: Effective Policies Toward Sustainability and Prosperity.”

If a city is completely powered by solar energy, what happens on a cloudy day?

No one really asked that question in the morning presentation entitled “Sustainable Mobility: Living in a Small World, After All,” an examination of how city development effects transportation.

But new things are in the works, including the development of an environmentally friendly, energy efficient city powered only by the sun in southwest Florida.

Sounding a bit like a sci-fi novel, “Tomorrow is Too Late,” last night’s informal discussion actually opened with a discussion about on line poker players and their need for sustenance.

“Even that person has to have a pizza delivery, right?” asked Jolene Molitoris, director of the Ohio Department of Transportation, whose point was that transportation effects every enterprise.

Ohio received $1.5 billion in transportation stimulus funds, she said. Half went to bridges and road upgrades, the other half went to all parts of the multi-modal system, Molitoris said.  

“We did things faster and more collaboratively than ever before,” she said. “The real change is we have one gear and that is fast.”

This conference and resulting dialogue tends to steer toward a competitive stance, said Britta Gross, director of Global Energy Systems and Infrastructure Commercialization, General Motors, R&D and Strategic Planning.

In other words, which is best, bio fuels, batteries, EVs, or hybrids?