All Your Green Blog

Check these jokers out: Hummerguy.net. I hesitate to link to them for fear of adding credibility, but this discussion really requires you to see what the other side looks like.

Now, you can read the article, it's fairly benign, if idiotic. Now read the comments! The comments, by the way are limited to people the site owner has specifically granted wordpress access to. There is no community discussion. And what do you get for your intentionally limited views? In regards to the article's ethanol-capable Hummer: "they should really consider putting the H2H into production, that would satisfy the Eco Maniacs."

Well, georgieboysobota, I maybe committing a well known blunder, but you're a consummate nincompoop. Why would "Eco Maniacs" be excited over a transition to a completely new fuel alternative and infrastructure to drive your ridiculously useless, oversized monstrosity? You're getting "Anti-war Maniacs" and "Eco Maniacs" mixed up. The H2H he's talking about is a hydrogen fuel-cell powered concept hummer. That's grand, but as I'll discuss in a bit, there are far simpler ways to appease Eco Maniacs than reconstructing the entire American automotive infrastructure from the ground up.

Now as interesting as alternative fuels are, "Flex Fuel", or a vehicle's capacity to use high-concentration ethanol-gas mixtures, is unbelievably off-target. Corn, a common source, is one of the most environmentally unfriendly crops that exist. It taxes soil nitrogen levels heavily, is grown with pesticides and fertilizers (which then have adventures in the rest of the watershed and eventually the ocean). Not to mention, ethanol is just a hydro-carbon, which will always product carbon dioxide when burnt. It is lower in other emissions, but the net gain is very difficult to see.

What about real alternative fuels? Say... electricity? There are two primary arguments against electric cars today. First is an infrastructural argument. Our country is set up to generate, transport, and distribute liquid fuels very efficiently and in huge quantities. This was one of the biggest problems facing companies trying to build support for hydrogen fuel cells, as well. The fact is, unlike our poor fuel cell friends, there is a massive electrical infrastructure already in place. And since electric cars don't draw much more power than some of your existing appliances, it's entirely feasible.

The second argument is that most of our electricity is generated by coal power plants. I've never really understood this one. Isn't this a problem with the infrastructure, not with the cars? First, we should be looking for any and every alternative to coal power plants. They're disgusting and embarrassing as human beings. There's no excuse for them. Second, even when powered by coal, an electric car has a vastly lower carbon footprint. You may be shocked to learn that it's not terribly efficient to carry an entire power plant around with you everywhere, when compared to having a centralized system that distributes power to devices that are only intended to be efficient users of power, not generators themselves. And finally, third, a society that uses electric vehicles can swap out any new and improved source of power as technology provides them. It might be coal today, but it could be nuclear, geothermal, solar, tidal, or magic power tomorrow.

I'll leave you with this to consider: