The Other Way

The Other Way
By David Glenn Cox



Electric cars have no need for motor oil, none. They have no need for transmission fluid, none. There are fewer moving parts to maintain in an electric car than in a gas-powered car. Electric cars produce zero emissions, zero. Electric cars produced today have a 250-mile range with the equivalent energy use of over 100-Mpg. Unlike hydrogen or water fuel-cell prototypes, the infrastructure is in place and access to electricity is plentiful.

The average American drives their car less than 50 miles per day, or six charges a month. Hydrogen must be manufactured by a process called electrolysis; take three guesses at the main element required for electrolysis. Fuel cells require pure water to operate on, which requires energy to distill the pure water. The rush and media acclaim for the hybrid vehicle is unanimous, but why? The hybrids are expensive and don’t solve the main problem: our dependence on foreign oil. It's like telling a junkie, if you shoot less heroin tomorrow, we’ll all be so proud of you!

Not that hybrids aren’t an improvement, but they are two conflicting compromises. Added battery weight is required to accommodate the infernal combustion engine. So the engine is reduced in size and power to save weight, causing most hybrid engines to be either glorified battery chargers or conventional vehicles with a battery assist. They carry the complications of both systems without benefiting from the advantages of either. Gasoline engines deliver immense power in a small package and can be quickly refueled. This was not always the case and our infrastructure grew up to meet the demand.

The Germans, in WWII, invested in jet aircraft technology, not for performance reasons but for fuel reasons. Jet aircraft could be operated on low-grade kerosene while conventional piston engines required high-grade, premium aviation gasoline. The piston aircraft engine had reached its maximum performance, the jet offered new vistas. New technology does that, by investing in it there are unintended benefits. In the German's case, the government was behind the research so there was no dissent.

When Edison began to electrify New York City, the gaslight concerns balked and stories of electrical fires and the possibility of electrocution filled the papers. When Nikola Tesla began his feud with Edison over AC verses DC, Edison himself showed, through the public electrocution of animals, an attempt to warn the public of the dangers of alternating current. But in both cases, it was the established, entrenched business trying to protect its turf from the new competitor.

Edison didn’t stand a chance; he was a great idea man but sometimes the theoretical genius has to hand off the idea to the real engineers. The Nazi rocket program was born out of the Treaty of Versailles' limits on artillery. Werner Von Braun declared publicly before the war that his goal was to put a man in space. Nonsense and rubbish, why should we do that? What possible advantage is there to gain from space vehicles? The politicians could only see weapons wedded to old technology; their answer was not to change but to modify the old into the new.

After the war, American auto manufactures dusted off the automobile plans, left behind in 1941, to make new vehicles. Every innovation for change was slapped down and run out of town by the big three automakers. Innovation costs money and it might not pan out. But Japanese car makers, dealing with expensive fuel, built fuel-efficient cars. Not because they were smarter, they were just dealing with their own market conditions. Did the big three try to adjust and accept the new technology? To a degree, but it was easier to focus on profits by importing foreign-made vehicles and to work on Capitol Hill to fight higher CAFÉ standards.

In Europe, wind farming and wind energy usage is higher than in the United States, even though the US has higher winds and greater available land to make such plants more feasible. The coal lobby pushes for clean coal and the administration is all for it, although coal will never be as clean as wind or as plentiful as solar. The choice is not one over the other, the choice is priorities. Wind, solar and then coal?


No, this administration has never been accused of having its priorities straight. They prefer coal, nuclear and then coal. The lunacy of a paranoid administration which sees boogey men under its bed and terrorists disguised as little old ladies in every airport, but just can’t wait to build more nuclear power plants.

But again, it’s the entrenched battling the next wave, the old technology fighting off the new, calling for clean coal, hybrid vehicles, safe nuclear. But there is no clean coal. There is cleaner coal, and more efficient hybrids, and the safest nuclear plants are the ones never built. The last few years it was the congressional push for ethanol, assisted by the farm lobbies and agribusiness, that this year has become a bust. Making fuel from corn takes energy, just like making hydrogen or distilling water. America is willing to accept change, provided big business can profit and control it.

America is uniquely fortunate in that it has a wind corridor that runs from Texas to Minnesota and it has a solar corridor that extends from West Texas to California. The raw materials of wind and solar are there, the technology for safe, renewable energy is readily available. The only major hurdle is fighting the entrenched technologies and their government lobbies. In California the Tesla electric car is in production, its cost driven up by the cost of its batteries, capable of a full recharge in four hours.

The US government has subsidized clean coal technology to the tune of $250 million a year for over a decade, in an effort that can best be described as crack light. The nuclear industry is entirely dependent on the US government, with taxpayer-funded fuel, waste disposal and insurance. The costs run into billions of dollars, all for a technology that is both dangerous and filthy. Ethanol subsidies for 2006 were another $7 billion but Americans get to pay that twice, once with tax subsidies and once at the grocery store with higher food prices.

So even the money is there for safe, clean, alternative energy; it’s just a question of wresting it from the hands of the entrenched, lobby-protected industries. We need a President and a Congress with a serious interest in changing things, of leaving nineteenth and twentieth century technology behind and moving with the sun in our face and the wind at our back towards a better future. Leaving the plutonium merchants and the coal barons behind, like the harness menders and buggy makers of a hundred years ago.

We need to move forward and yet to reclaim our past as a country that once welcomed new technology. To move into the future where the clean profits and clean jobs are to be found and stop the madness of exporting $600 billion a year to people that, if the truth be told, don’t like us very much anyway. To go the other way, the road less traveled, obviously the right way, but our path is blocked by lobbyists and special interests.

Kicked and recommended.:thumbsup: