Key An Alternative Energy Car.

Listen- 5.15 minutes

A 1988 law allows car makers who produce "Flex fuel" cars, i.e. cars that can run on gasoline or E-85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) or most other mixtures of the two, to make their cars more fuel inefficient as a reward. This means that cars will consume "2 Billion more gallons of gas next year, according to government projections. That's the same as putting an extra 2 million Hummers on the road. (...) It cancels out all the gas saved by Priuses and other hybrids 30 times over."

There are about 5 million Flex fuel cars owned in the U.S., but only 500 stations carrying it. In Washington alone, there are 40-50 thousand but no stations that sell it to the public.

The incentive law was due to expire, but was extended in 2004 and ratified in 2005. "Carmakers lobbied hard to keep the program going. Even though it lets them make cars that guzzle more gas, they say they support it for the sake of reducing Americans' gas consumption."

Meanwhile... oil companies reported record profits this year.

Cars that don't run entirely on gasoline are interesting to the United States for one major reason, and it has nothing to do with the environment.

Rather, it has everything to do with what happens if there was a disruption regarding foreign oil supply. The United States has a lot of natural gas and propane readily available.

Recall the turmoil in 1941 when an oil embargo was placed upon Japan, the reasons for or against which I won't go into here.

So alternate fuel vehicle technology is quite a rational thing for the United States to have in production on a relatively small scale. The dual fuel, or "Conversion kit" strategy makes it even more rational.

As does having a lot of government vehicles already prepared simply by 'filling up' on a different fuel.


So.... does anyone still think it's all about the environment?

Which is exactly why the cars should be fuel efficient and not the opposite. Using a dual fuel strategy as a loophole to produce more unefficient cars is bafflingly asinine if the point is to save fuel in the event of a disruption of foreign fuel supplies. The architecture to switch to the secondary fuel is not in place, nor is enough of it produced to marginally meet potential demand in a crisis. Couple that with the free pass we've given auto makers to make inefficient cars (as an incentive for saving us gas, no less) and we'll see our reserves drop at a much faster rate- defeating the whole purpose of the plan to begin with.

No argument with that - and in fact, hybrid cars can be seen as a problem insofar as they will *extend* the fossil fuel era.

Some have argued (quite successfully) that energy efficency with fossil fuel vehicles in the 1970's made car ownership an option for a lot more people, and thus more pervasive, worsening the problem.


Taking it even further - even a new energy source to replace fossil fuels will cause trouble, no matter how ideal.

Consider North America. It was a 'full' continent with about 2M people on it for thousands of years - only the advent of fossil fuel energy allowed it to swell to roughly 500M people (Canada/USA/Mexico).

So adding lots of free, miraculously clean energy will do... what?

I'm just gonna start pogoballing it to work...

Key the car of someone who bitches about the energy crisis, cough cough john kerry cough cough... yet still drives an SUV.

Make more candidates for Running Man style shows.

Will eventually crowd every place on the map so much that everyone either lives in their cubicle for the entirety of their life or makes public transportation a much more widely used alternative

Good idea!!

This is how I plan to get to work next year.

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