Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on October 17, 2011
I will just come out and say it: I am not a fan of the electric car. Why? Because most sources of electricity are NOT clean. About 48.7% of our electricity comes from coal, and any way you slice it, coal is still not clean energy. If nuclear power plants (19.4%) were clean, I’d be all for them, but the dirty fact is: there’s no way to safely store the waste from nuclear energy generation. The radioactive pollution is so underplayed, no one even talks about it.
If we want to get on a creative spike in this country, we have to go in a completely different direction than our so-called “leaders” are taking us. We have to reduce oil consumption, reduce coal use, get off biofuels, off fracking for natural gas and into truly clean energy. We have to get away from the internal combustion engine, which creates most of the CO2 in our atmosphere. In fact, anything that burns anything creates more of what contributes to the climate crisis.
It will take time, but we have to focus in the right direction first. The reason you may be thinking that there are automotive alternatives to coal (or electric), or oil, or the internal combustion engine, is that you are conditioned to believe that these are our only choices.
If we can spend billions upon billions of dollars making oil into gasoline and plastics and crappy nitrogen “fertilizer”, if we can spend billions upon billions to promote the biofuels industry, which uses a ridiculous amount of water to grow the crops whose fuel ends up getting burned and polluting the air, then we can spend those same billions making fuel cells, or funding solar projects like SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) or cars that run on pressurized air or flywheels (a nod here to NASCAR for at least looking at flywheels!)
Again, the only reason you haven’t heard of these things is because the people who run all the other industries are invested heavily in them. Let’s turn the tide and change the way we think!
I will be presenting other energy-creating systems that Americans rarely hear about but which are being used in Germany, India, and other countries that are far ahead of us in the area of energy production, the automotive industry and heating/cooling systems. Wake up, America! We are just infants when it comes to learning what the leading edge technologies are!