I was supposed to go to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last week as a guest of Ford, but I got sick last minute and unfortunately had to back out. Fortunately, you can watch this overview by the crew at Inhabitat.

Road pricing and congestion charging, whether you like the idea or not, is going to come, and in its most recent issue Scientific American has identified Toronto-based Skymeter as one of the companies likely to get us there. Here’s the link — give it a read. The company’s CEO, Kamal Hassan, is the son of my high-school physics teacher, so I have a soft spot for these guys. But their technology is solid. The problem is our unwillingness as a society to embrace changes that are necessary to overcome our transportation infrastructure deficit, tackle congestion, reduce urban smog and lower CO2 emissions.

I know saying is not doing, and that’s certainly true in democratic countries that are politically polarized, but when China says it’s going to do something, you can be sure it’s going to try. The world’s largest emitter of CO2 may not be signing onto any international climate treaties, but don’t confuse that for inaction. The country has committed over the next 10 years to building enough renewable-energy capacity that it could serve a country the size of Canada four times over. As we squabble about how to combat emissions and how to move forward in the green economy, China is doing. We can blame China for its current emissions, which are indirectly caused by us, since it’s the insatiable consumerism of western society that’s driving those emissions; or, we can see China’s drive to deploy renewable energy as a reason to up our game. If you want to get a sense of what China has planned, click here. We need to get our collective heads out of the oil sands and start building the future, not basing our future on an addiction to the past.

I reported earlier on plans by the City of Toronto to begin converting its organic bin waste into biogas that can be upgraded to natural gas and injected into the region’s natural gas pipeline. Currently, the methane resulting from the city’s main biodigester facility is flared, but plans are finally underway to capture methane at the existing facility and a new facility to be built. There are two options for how the city will use the gas. It could sell it into Enbridge’s natural gas pipeline as a way to offset the natural gas it currently uses to heat government buildings, or it could use it to fuel a new fleet of waste collection vehicles that run on compressed natural gas. Hinting at the latter, the city purchased and recently received its first waste-collection vehicle that runs on CNG. Read the city’s news release here.

It would be a great achivement if Toronto could one day claim to be running all its garbage trucks on, well, garbage. I know it’s not politically correct to call it garbage, but you know what I mean. Better to offset the use of diesel fuel than to flare a perfectly useful source of energy.

The biggest barrier to introducing peer-to-peer carsharing services to the general public is believed to be insurance. What insurance company is prepared to insure a primary driver on a vehicle that could end up being driven several times a month by a complete stranger? The fear is that insurance companies simply wouldn’t cover somebody who enrolled their vehicle in a peer-to-peer carshare service, or would refuse to honour an insurance contract if it was found the vehicle was driven as part of such a service. Also, even if an insurance company kept your coverage, there might be a tendency for them to jack up your rates.

California legislators are aiming to clear up this matter. A new bill making its way to the Assembly Floor makes it clear that insurance companies can’t penalize someone for enrolling their vehicle in a carshare service, and this is because the service provider must have separate commercial insurance covering the vehicle at times when the car has been signed out by someone other than the car owner. If this bill passes, it will clear the way for peer-to-peer car sharing in California, and set a precedent that other states and provinces (in Canada) can follow. I wrote about this in my recent Clean Break column, which has generated a lot of interest from Canadian entrepreneurs who see value in starting up such a service in Canada.

This is a cool concept that needs to be explored more thoroughly.