The news from Iceland has been all about its economic meltdown, but there’s other seismic activity going on there, too. Will Iceland roll with hydrogen vehicles or, as it looks increasingly likely, plug-in battery ones?

Despite the delivery, during the Copenhagen climate talks, of 10 new Ford Focus FCV fuel-cell vehicles into the tiny country of just 300,000 people (adding to a small fleet of 10 hydrogen-burning Priuses), it’s still likely that Iceland will have an EV infrastructure before there’s extensive fuel cell operations. (Photo: Ford.)

Iceland is still on the ropes financially, and that complicates the purchase of any high-tech cars in what is otherwise the greenest country on earth (according to the Yale/Columbia Environmental Performance Index). After all, more than 80 percent of Iceland’s energy use is from ultra-clean domestic sources, including geothermal and hydro.

Iceland already produces far more electricity than its small use (which explains the presence of those current-heavy aluminum smelters). It could easily produce hydrogen in bulk, too. So which way will it go?

It’s official: I’ve become my grandmother. I realized it the other morning when I opened the door to our freezer.

That icy vault was packed to the brim. But — in the finest tradition of my Grandma Yeager — it wasn’t filled so much with leftovers, like you’d find in most household freezers. You see, my Grams had a few deep frozen secrets. She knew about weird stuff; weird stuff you can deep-six in the freezer and maybe save some money in the process.

* Candles: Keep your wax candles in the freezer and they’ll burn longer. It’s especially good for slim table tapers that normally burn very fast.

* Batteries: A number of studies have shown that storing batteries in the freezer helps them retain their charge longer. This is less true for alkaline batteries (freezing extends their shelf life by only about 5%) than it is for NiMH and Nicad batteries often used in electronics. Keeping NiMH batteries in the freezer can boost battery life by 90%.

* Plant Seeds: Many (but not all) types of plant seeds will keep longer and germinate more successfully when stored in the freezer. Consult a copy of Seed Storage of Horticultural Crops, by S.D. Doijode, for more than you’d ever want to know about this fascinating topic. Many of the planet’s most important seeds are being stored in the chilly “doomsday” seed vault in Norway.

* Cheap Booze: In the interest of full disclosure, my Grams was a teetotaler. Me, I need an attitude adjustment from time to time, and I’ve found that storing cheap booze — not just vodka, but all types of distilled spirits — in the freezer makes it taste smoother (and more expensive).

* Wine Cubes: Speaking of keeping alcohol in the freezer, when you have a little leftover wine from dinner, pour it into an ice cube tray and freeze it. “Wine cubes” are perfect to use in making stock and other cooking.

* Plastic Soda Bottles Filled with Water: Grandma knew that keeping her freezer chockfull helped to insulate it and perform better, and kept things cold longer if the electricity failed. I like to fill empty plastic soda bottles nearly full with water, and put them in the freezer to take up any vacant space. Plus they make convenient “drip-less ice cubes” to use instead of real ice cubes in my ice chest.

Best Buy parking lots are ideal for EV charging. (Flickr/NCReedplayer)

For electric vehicle (EV) advocates, it’s a no-brainer: Big-box stores have huge parking lots, and it’s in their interest to keep you shopping as long as possible. Given that, why wouldn’t they be friendly to installing EV charging in their lots? And, hell, won’t they just make it free (a $2 to $4 value) so they’ll have an advantage over the competition?

For some reason, however, the usually publicity-friendly big boxes are curiously unwilling to say much about the idea.

The beauty of big box plug-ins, the thinking goes, is that fast-charging an EV (with 480 volts, which big boxes will have but you won’t) will take 15 to 20 minutes, and those consumers aren’t going to sit in their cars and watch the juice flow. They’ll go into the store!

Jonathan Read, CEO of fast-moving charging company ECOtality, offers a vision of consumers holding swipable “charge cards” (get it?) and for 60 cents or $1 getting topped off with electric power as they sip their Starbucks latte. “We think charging will be stimulated by the government, but ultimately it will be offered by the private sector,” he said. “Soon the charging will be ubiquitous in the retail landscape, and companies will be at a competitive disadvantage if they don’t offer it.”

There are complications, of course. My colleague Matthew DeBord of Slate’s “Shifting Gears” blog agrees that Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy and the others “have the lot space,” but unless they offer charging at every spot (probably cost-prohibitive) congestion could occur. “It isn’t hard to imagine ‘charge lines’ forming, or the need to employ service personnel to act almost as valets, if people are going to shop while charging. It’s also unclear whether fast-charge stations would need to be carefully attended during the charging process, to prevent vehicles from staying hooked up to the chargers once they’re fully re-juiced.”

One way of avoiding the need for EV valets is a charging solution proposed by a new company called Evatran, which starting late this year will offer hands-free electric fill-ups. Using the concept of inductive charging, cars will drive into a parking space and draw the front of their vehicles over the concrete barrier at the end of the space. A charger embedded in the barrier will connect with a “vehicle adapter” on the car, and the charge can jump a half-inch gap (without presenting a shock hazard, they say).

I was hoping to talk about this with the retailers themselves, but most didn’t reply to repeated queries. From Target’s Amy Reilly: “I understand you called Target seeking information about electric car chargers in our parking lots. We’ve got nothing specific to share regarding this topic.”

She told me my story wasn’t “specific to Target,” whereupon I offered to make it so. “I’m sorry, but no,” she said.

Paula Baldwin at Best Buy, which is already selling electric Brammo motorcycles, was a bit more forthcoming. “Thanks for tapping us re: the EV charging station story you’re working on,” she emailed. “Best Buy is testing a number of options in the e-vehicle space, but has no definitive plans around EV charging at this time.”

They directed me to the Best Buy EV website, where the following video about their work with plug-in Brammo motorcycles resides:

With even Porsche getting into the hybrid SUV crossover game, there are more and more options (many of them affordable) for buyers looking for fuel-efficiency in an SUV.

Happy America Saves Week! Whatever you do, don’t run out and buy me a present. That would defeat the whole purpose of the holiday.

America Saves Week 2010 (February 21-28) is a nationwide campaign involving more than 1,000 nonprofit, government and corporate groups that encourages individuals and families to save and build personal wealth. Their website is loaded with free resources and advice, including a nifty calculator that allows you to track your net worth. (WARNING: The calculator is easy to use, but the results might be hard to take.)

America Saves Week is a perfect time to start getting your financial house in order and maybe jump-start that flagging New Year’s resolution to spend less and save more. Here are my top five tips to help get you started:

1.) Go on a Fiscal Fast:

Swear-off all spending for a couple of days - or ideally an entire week - as a sort of “spending detox.” It’s time to use it up, make it last, or do without. A fiscal fast will save you some money (put it into savings or pay off some debt with what you save!), and teach you about how you spend — and probably waste — money in a typical week. It’ll also remind you of how many terrific things in life are free.

2.) Practice Spending Procrastination:

When it comes to discretionary spending, it usually pays to put off buying until tomorrow what you’re tempted to buy today. Studies have shown that we have regrets about nearly 80% of the discretionary purchases we make within the first year of making the purchase. Force yourself to wait at least a week between the time you see an item in a store and when you go back to purchase it. Chances are great that you’ll reconsider and never go back to buy it.

3.) Put Your Finances on Autopilot:

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, “The money? You can’t handle the money!” Have your paychecks and other income deposited directly into your bank account(s), including automatic allocations into designated savings and investment accounts. Then authorize your creditors (e.g. credit card companies, mortgage lender, insurance company, etc.) to automatically withdraw your payments every month from your account. By putting your finances on autopilot, savings becomes automatic and you’ll never have late fees or missed payments again.

When it gets below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it snows. I was on Fox Business last week, during the big snowstorm that reached out and touched 50 states, and found myself repeating this salient fact.

The segment was touting a theme Fox had been following all week: That the mammoth winter storm meant death for Al Gore’s theories. They even planted a copy of An Inconvenient Truth in a snowdrift and used a Gorecam to watch it get buried. Piling on, the Virginia Republicans did a TV ad urging state voters to recall Rick Boucher and Tom Periello, Democratic congressman who’d had the temerity to vote for cap and trade.

But snowstorms don’t negate global warming, they really don’t. The Center for American Progress mustered out Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, to point out that “snowfall does not equal a drop in temperature.” According to Masters, “As long as it’s cold enough for snow, precipitation means a snowstorm.” That used to come under the heading of common sense.

Joseph Romm, on his Climate Progress blog, reminded us that this is the warmest winter on record, and that January 2010 was the warmest for the planet ever. “The scientific literature predicts that you will see more intense winter storms because of global warming,” he said.

That’s because warmer temperatures mean heavier precipitation. At the National Wildlife Federation, climate scientist Amanda Staudt reports that global warming has already brought a pattern of larger and more intense snowstorms in the upper Midwest and Northeast.

Given my proclivity for adopting minimalist New Year’s resolutions, I’m really pushing the envelope this year by vowing to thoroughly declutter my house and my life.

In January, I dove head over long into my decluttering campaign, rummaging through the garage, closets, and dresser drawers for items I haven’t used in at least the past year or two. I’ve told myself that those are the things I should seriously consider parting company with. My pile of rarely used items quickly began to take over the living room floor, and when I stood back to appraise my progress, a wave of anxiety hit me. It was a veritable tsunami of materialistic nostalgia.

This is great stuff, I said to myself. I can’t give it away!

My original intention had been to cart everything off to a local thrift store, or maybe post it on the Freecycle Network, as those are terrific ways to redistribute things you no longer need But I decided that my old stuff is so special, it deserves the best possible new home. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but after some online research, here’s my last will and testament concerning the distribution of my stuff to some very special new homes:

* My favorite-but-now-sadly- threadbare fleece jacket: I’ll drop it off at the local Patagonia store, where it’ll be recycled into new clothing as part of Patagonia’s Common Threads Recycling program.

* The speed-bag that nearly knocked me out last time I tried to use it: SportsGifts.org will pass it along to an aspiring Rocky Balboa, since they use donated sports equipment to create community-based sports programs for underprivileged kids around the world.

* A duplicate copy of Stuart Little, one of my all-time favorite books by E.B. White: I know it will find a good home and delight some young reader when I donate it to <a href=”http://www.ProjectNightNight.org” target=”_blank”Project Night Night, a nonprofit organization that provides “Night Night” tote bags filled with books and other items to homeless children.

Once upon a time there were a pair of Midwestern folkies, Michael Brewer and Tom Shipley, and after meeting up in LA circa 1967 they decided, in Paul Simon’s immortal words, to marry their fortunes together. It was the 60s, and they looked the part. They could also harmonize like Crosby and Stills if they were minus Nash, so they built up quite a following as Brewer and Shipley.

Ohio native Tom Shipley, who now produces video at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, remembers it all well, or at least as well as someone who, at 69, still describes marijuana as his favorite indulgence is likely to. “We had an underground following, and were filling rooms pretty well,” he says now. “But then ‘One Toke’ happened and everything went nuts.”

“One Toke Over the Line” is about being stoned in a railway station, and (this was the 60s, man) it was also a huge hit. Richard Nixon called them “public miscreants” and added their names to his notorious Enemies list, but the song also got bowdlerized on the Lawrence Welk Show. With Jerry Garcia playing pedal steel, it reached #10 in 1971.

“When we wrote ‘One Toke Over the Line,’ I think we were one toke over the line,” said Shipley, who says he was “turned on” by another legendary musician, Buzzy Linhart. “I considered marijuana a sort of a sacrament…” Fans threw joints on the stage, and waitresses at shows were tipped with them.

Brewer says he was never a hippie, but Shipley admits to being a card-carrying member of the peace-sign-and-Volkswagen-van clan. It’s unfortunate that their hit came after Woodstock, because otherwise they would undoubtedly have played there.

Shipley, who left full-time music when it wasn’t fun anymore, is now the university’s videographer, and his favorite subject is filming the students’ efforts in such green car events as the North American Solar Car Challenge and the Formula SAE series. They’ve also taken part in attempts to set land speed records in human-powered vehicles (a/k/a bicycles). In all cases, the young engineers start from scratch and build vehicles to compete with other colleges.

“We build very light cars for the Solar Car Challenge,” Shipley said, “made of carbon fiber over blue insulation board. The lithium-ion batteries come from Kokam America, one of our sponsors. It’s experiential learning, with the students learning about practical applications of solar energy by putting the cars together–and staying up all night to fix problems.”

The races cover routes such as Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, or Dallas to Calgary, and Shipley goes along with his high-def cameras. The films help the school find sponsors to get the teams on the road. “By the time the students graduate, they’re in demand,” Shipley said. “I feel really blessed,” he added. “I’ve won tons of awards, and I’ve had two really good careers.”

Toyota dealerships: The cars are under several recalls. (Flickr photo)

Do you own one of the Toyota cars recalled by the company for unintended acceleration? Good, because many consumers are confused. At a time when cooperation would seem to be key, three of the principals — including Toyota, the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and CTS Corp., the company that makes the recalled pedals, are feuding. Meanwhile, at presstime the feds announced that their investigation is spreading to include the possibility of electronic interference causing the problem.

The casualty may be the public’s need to know how to handle this burgeoning crisis. “The mess has spread,” says Barron’s.

Toyota North American boss Jim Lentz has been very visible as apologist in chief. “This is embarrassing to us,” he said during media appearances Monday, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean we have lost our edge on quality. Our reputation is based on safety.”

Toyota will lose sales: According to Kelley Blue Book, the resale value of Toyota’s recalled models is likely to erode by up to two percent on dealer lots this week. Still, there’s some evidence that consumers are snapping up the company’s used cars because they’re perceived as bargains.

Earlier today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood responded to complaints that NHTSA (one of his agencies) has let Toyota take the lead in engineering a fix for owners of the cars. According to LaHood, “They should have taken it seriously from the very beginning when we first started discussing it with them,” he said in an Associated Press interview today. “Maybe they were a little safety deaf in their North American office…”

Meanwhile, trouble is also brewing in CTS Corp., the Elkhart, Indiana firm that makes the 5.3 million pedal assemblies that Toyota has recalled. CTS doesn’t want to be the fall guy for Toyota, and has pointed out that it had no role in initiating the recall. And it is denying responsibility for unintended acceleration. “CTS believes that the rare slow return pedal phenomenon, which may occur in extreme environmental conditions,” it said in a statement. The company’s pedals “should absolutely not be linked with any sudden unintended acceleration incidents,” the company said.

CTS said that it wasn’t aware of any injuries or accidents “caused by the rare slow return pedal condition.”

Catching up with Doie’s Sara Kirsner.