A little before Election Day, I heard Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D., of the eco-design non-profit Terreform, speak to a gathering of green leaders at Tree in the East Village, NYC (the event was sponsored by GreenSpaces).

Named one of Wired Magazine's 15 People the Next President Should Listen To, Joachim doesn't really look the part . You don't see many flag-backed dreadlocks lining up at Obama's press conferences these days. Of course, he gets away with it by being ridiculously intelligent.

The following excerpt, in addition to being a nice time-capsule from the election, presents some of Joachim's innovative solutions for a post-carbon presidency, from the American military to domestic transportation (and thus the flailing automotive industry).

Mitchell Joachim: I'm not really a Republican or a Democrat. I don't care so much for either party. More or less. [But] I can understand the individuals. And I think McCain would want a very different answer from me than Obama...So I have two answers for these guys. You can guess who's who.

The first thought was that we should have a carbon-free military. We should invest all our R&D for warfare into making these vehicles run in a good way for the environment. They would be hydrogen-based or electric or fuel-cell-based vehicles. Why do that? Well, not because it's good for the environment because the military I don't think cares. It's because there are advantages to a military of not being dependent on oil. Of running silent. Military folks like stealthy vehicles. Of having vehicles that have distributed power so that if you knock out one particular component of these big scary war machines which will never go away despite more than fifty years since the Geneva Convention. They will still run. Or unitized volumes of distributed power, so that if your tank gets hit you can take components out and power your Hummer. Take those components out and power some other nasty device.

Either way it's getting the military to solve a lot of our infrastructural problems in our battle for fuel cells, etc., that our car industry isn't doing so well...So I'm sure you can use that money to change how we think about our mobility.

The other solution that I had was a new system of mobility for New York City - but changing the constituency of mobility. So the second answer was that power companies I think would be great at taking over the American automotive industry. I think they're certainly fit out to build not only the infrastructure but also drive trains to run these particular vehicles. I happen to know that they're very interested in doing something like that. So what they would do is set up an electrical grid with dynamically-loaded battery systems distributed through city cores that would take in peak demands in core recharge areas or produce the micro-generation of electricity. But these things are on wheels. They would essentially produce these engines that have no moving parts, which is already being developed. A fuel cell has no moving parts... That's another thing the military likes is engines with no moving parts - easy to switch out and so forth.

So if we get our infrastructure built out by power companies, they're also building these mobile battery devices that could move throughout the grid. Give the automakers a task which is to build carriages and chastities and components and ergonomic interiors. You know....Let them do what they've been doing for the last fifty years. The same wrapped gift in a slightly different color. And they would just get out of the engine-making business.

And if we combine those two forces, you'd have a whole different way of looking at America when it comes to mobility.