December 10th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore
Green Right Now

Last week in Poland, attendees at the United Nations’ climate conference were greeted by an impressive creature — a car that, powered by nothing but the sun, had made a trip around the globe to meet them.

The car’s owner, a Swiss schoolteacher named Louis Palmer, intends to hang around the conference until its close on Friday, treating his vehicle like a “solar taxi” and offering free rides to the event’s “delegates, ministers and the press”; he even let UN Climate official Yvo de Boer hop in for the last few meters of his historic voyage.

For its record-breaking trek, the car traveled over 33,000 miles through 38 countries (one assumes a boat ride or two were involved as well); the trip took a year and a half.

Palmer says he made the trip “to demonstrate that clean technologies are available now to curb global warming,” according to an Environment News Service report that goes on to summarize some of the developments so far at the conference — which include a pledge from Brazil to drastically slow deforestation and a plan to curb illegal logging in an effort to preserve more trees for carbon dioxide capture.

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