I put this customized bumper sticker on our car more than 2 years ago.

Are you as fed up with people who text while driving as I am?

I pray every day that my family and I don’t get taken out by some selfish idiot who thinks it’s okay to surf the web while steering (or trying to steer) a several thousand-pound metal box around at 75 mph.

I also pray that if anyone is going to be taken out by the texting/surfing driver, that it happens in this order: 1) the driver who’s texting; 2) anyone who argues that the freedom to text/surf and drive is worth dying for.

Of course, the world isn’t just, or fair, and so it doesn’t usually happen like that. Instead, thousands of innocent, non-texting/surfing drivers/passengers end up as the victims of others’ stupidity.

One of the American Petroleum Institute's 'I'm an Energy Voter' ads which have been running recently in major American newspapers.

If you’re a regular newspaper reader, as I am, you may have seen the American Petroleum Institute’s latest ad campaign to drum up support for fossil fuels in America, the so-called “Vote 4 Energy” campaign.

Every time I see one of these ads I wish I had the money to buy my own full-page USA Today spread and take on the API’s smarmy rhetoric not to mention the canned ad models – does anyone actually believe the people pictured in these ads are real, average, everyday Americans?

Since I don’t have that kind of money , I’ll have to settle for a short blog entry on SolarChargedDriving.Com.

So, here goes, my response ad to the API’s “I’m an energy voter” ads. The ad’s original content is in black-colored type, my alterations and additions are in – you guessed it ;-) – green-->

The U.S. has way more sun than Germany, yet Germany continues to beat the U.S. in total solar installations by a wide margin.

If you’re a solar geek (like me ;-), you’ve probably read that Germany saw about three gigawatts of new solar installations in the month of December alone, or more than two times as much new solar installed as was installed in the entire U.S. in all of 2011.

This, in a country about 1/23^rd the size of the lower 48 U.S. and in a country that gets, on average, about as much sun as the state of Alaska.

In the 2 ½ years I’ve been blogging at SolarChargedDriving.Com, I’ve been pretty hard on gas hogging automobiles and Americans’ strong tendency to buy a lot of them.

News that light trucks accounted for 55% of new vehicle sales in the U.S. in December would seem like another prime opportunity to take another shot at American short-sightedness and selfishness.

But I’m not going to hop on the slam-the-gas-hog-buyers express this time.