Americans aren’t ready for green

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Alan Linda

Last week’s column centered around the fact that, even though there were cars back in the 1960s that approached 30 miles per gallon, and even though back then we were all certain that by the year 2010, not only would we be driving cars that were nuclear powered and probably got about a million miles per ounce of uranium, they’d probably be flying.

Uh huh. Along with a lot of other disappointed folks who learned to drive in the ‘60s, I, too, am saddened by the fact that there seems little likelihood of getting my Rocketeer license.

So, OK. What really twists my tail is the fact that the mileage of today’s vehicles really hasn’t gotten that much better. There are a couple of reasons for that: 1. We, the American people, continue to manifest huge amounts of unjustified indignation toward the possibility that someone else might tell us what to drive; and 2. A concept labeled “enthalpy” pretty much boxes us into the situation in which we now find ourselves regarding energy.

Enthalpy is a somewhat complex sequence which, while entirely understandable, tends to take a lengthy explanation. So let’s do unjustified indignation first.

By unjustified indignation, I mean that as long as there are people in this world who have the affluence necessary to buy and drive Hummer-sized vehicles — and there are a lot of those people, you’d better believe — then the entire basis of capitalism will continue to provide these people with them.

The fact that there are Hummer-sized vehicles leads directly to corporate responsibility to provide shareholders with enough profit on their investment that they continue to invest in that particular corporation’s venture. That venture is profit, which produces return on investment, which produces more investment, etc. It’s a pretty circular deal, the profit motive. The bottom line: Big cars, big profit; small cars, small profit.

In a movie called “The Death of the Electric Car,” a great deal of nefarious behavior is attributed to General Motors because of their initial enthusiasm for the project, and because of their later attempts to collect all those neat electric cars and crush them up, get them away from the public.

General Motors may or may not have been trying to cover something up with their behavior, something, that is, that might have been illegal or immoral behavior. One cannot completely ignore that possibility. That may be what happened. More likely, some vice president somewhere was just covering his behind by getting rid of the evidence.

Ah ha! If there was evidence, you say, it must mean there was evil afoot. Doubtful. The only evidence here likely consisted of the sudden and investment-threatening fact that there was no money to be made by manufacturing this car. Not enough folks wanted it, or so it appeared, because it was just too radically different to gain the immediate industry-changing acceptance that is necessary to generate big enough numbers to support continued manufacturing profit.

I have a 1936 Plymouth Coupe. It has nearly the first hydraulic brakes ever installed on a popular American production car, a radical revolution in braking which the public didn’t get too worked up about because brakes are out of sight, therefore out of mind.

Had they known how different they were, they might have rashly concluded that something so radical might have come from the spawn of demons, and would crash them to death at the first opportunity.

That car also has a small-but-humanly-exitable canvas-covered opening in the roof, for the simple reason that buggies always had canvas tops; therefore anything that went down the road must also have that. Never mind that people had finally accepted gasoline-engine-powered cars — ah, but don’t ever forget that there were huge negative reactions to those damned things.

They’d buy and drive them, but enough was enough. The public wanted, in some way, to have what they used to have. They wanted some way to cut their way out of these metal monsters lest they roll over and in some hellacious manner trap and devour them in the jaws of mechanical monstrousness.

In this modern day and age, the concept of an all-electric car was just too much. Toyota correctly diagnosed this inability of humankind to jump over such a huge chasm of mechanical progress.

Toyota than demonstrated their understanding of the simple concept that people who do not study history are bound to destructively repeat it. They want canvas, give them canvas. They want gasoline engines, give them gasoline engines.

And give them electric ones, too. Bingo — hybrid autos.

Ah, we’re a reluctant group, we humans. It’s no wonder it took us 100,000 years to harness fire.

Next week, maybe we’ll tackle enthalpy, and learn why we’re in the boat — er, car — we’re now in.

Alan Linda writes from his New York Mills home.