It’s primary day in New Hampshire. There’s a very good chance that Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain will capture the most votes, hinting at a general election showdown that would pit one man of conscience and conviction against another. Talk about a welcome change. Somehow relatedly, I saw one of these cars on the road today in Colorado. The fully-electric-plug-into-your-wall ZENN car— Zero Emissions No Noise, which are made in Canada but for now almost exclusively available in the United States. So long as the Zenn company doesn’t get bought out, there’s probably a good chance it won’t decide to crush its own vehicles to escape their success. The car looked to me today, as the radio played news from New Hampshire, like a fluttering starting-line flag: you can do it, too, Detroit— start now to get a vast array of American alternative-power vehicles on the road by the first Tuesday of November! With any luck, the last gasping oil presidency will have just run out of gas.
Tags: zenn car
What I find most interesting about this debate over air pollution, is that the animus is being misdirected completely at the auto industry. There are more global issues I see as paramount, which seem to have been lost in VP Cheney’s energy plan, which was largely subsidized by the lobbying efforts of many companies involved in the energy industry. First of all, there is the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush has refused to sign. The issue is that every other country in the world has agreed to reduce their emissions by pre-determined amounts EXCEPT the United States, which is solely responsible for 75% of the world’s pollutants. Despite all the talk about how big China is, they fall a distant fifth (or so), and will remain so for decades. The majority of the pollutants come from the generation of electricity, mainly coal and some natural gas. It is no wonder, that the second largest corporation in America, General Electric, controls so much of the media (and popular press) as well as so much of the ancillary businesses related to energy production. They are also one of the strongest lobbyists against Kyoto. The closest they come to concessions on “green” technology, is asking everyone to buy energy saving light bulbs, which is self serving, because they produce those too.
How does this all relate to the auto industry? The calculus which must be performed (and admittedly, I haven’t run the numbers, it just seems intuitive), is that once one factors in the total miles that people must drive, and the resultant electricity which would be drawn, assuming it was even feasible for ALL CARS, though they would be “quiet” and have “zero emissions”, all of the emissions would then be shifted to the coal power plants, which have much less stringent regulations than auto emissions. In the end, it seems to me, that a world of all electric cars (besides being absurdly slow and inefficient for long distances) would only end up in greater pollution in the end.
Has anyone actually run this analysis, and placed it in front of Congress and consumers, so that it is a balanced argument? GE, for one, has no incentive to do so.