Many Americans ignore this, but a little over a century ago we had no idea what a car might look like, or how it might be powered. There were electric cars and steam-powered cars.
It wasn’t until the mass-produced Model T, affectionately known as the Tin Lizzie, appeared in 1914 that the question became settled. The mass market in cars led to a mass market for gasoline, the infrastructure gradually expanded, and by the end of World War II we were ready for the true automotive age.
This age is now ending. We’re running out of the necessary fuel. We’re running out of the necessary roads. It is obvious that the gasoline-powered car running under individual control is not a sustainable model for 21st century transport.
What will replace it? We don’t know.
This is an important point to get through your head. Will it be a
"conventional" hydrogen car, which runs with a fuel cell and has to be
recharged with gas every few hundred miles? Might it be an electric
car, which you plug in to re-fuel? Will it be a natural gas vehicle,
like so many commuter buses now appearing on urban streets? Will it be
a hydrogen-electric-gas hybrid, which uses an engine to turn water into hydrogen, then uses that hydrogen to move forward?
And what about the roads? Will people still drive cars 30 years from now, or will GPS and electronic navigation improve to the point where most cars run under computer-control, meaning they can run closer together, meaning you can increase the capacity of today’s road network by 10-fold without building another lane?
We don’t know.
The all-American answer to this is to let innovators such as HyPower Fuel give their ideas a go in the market. We badly need a new era of entrepreneurship, not the fascist-corporate-oligopoly this Administration has been delivering to us.
The answers are out there, and this time there is no guarantee an
American will come up with them. It took two wars to bring America’s
auto industry and her oil industry to glory — the world won’t stand
for that this time, and we have too much to lose in such a war. We’re
big enough to be a target, and today’s weapons are more-than-powerful
enough to make us one.
Before we can launch The War Against Oil, in other words, we have to answer some more basic questions about America’s nature, and her system.
These are the kinds of questions both our economic
and political system were designed to meet head-on. Their failure to
meet them so far, their outright refusal to consider them, is not the fault of
our leaders alone.
It’s our fault.
Do you hear me? Am I talking loud enough? No, I’m not.
The Democratic opposition to this Administration, and this current
business climate, is not founded on socialism. It is founded on the
best of American capitalism, a mixed-economy in which public and
private sectors do what they’re best at, where transparency and
experimentation are the rule, and where we’re all dedicated to
muddling-through.
I’m sorry if this doesn’t seem like a cool flag to march behind. But
it happens to be the American flag. Those currently flying the American
flag seem bent on bringing us old German values, Italian values, or
Russian values.
We have one shot at getting our flag back, and getting on the right
path, so that The War On Oil might be led by us and not by Europeans or Asians. How that struggle will play out is anyone’s guess. I don’t know
and you don’t either. Those who fear a violent confrontation
sound shrill, but I don’t know if they’re wrong. We’re relying on
Vladimir Putin, of all people, to put the fear of God into these people
so they won’t attack Iran — if he succeeds he deserves the Nobel Peace
Prize. Will that mean democracy has a chance?
I don’t know.
That’s the heart of a generational crisis, of any generational crisis. That’s the great unknown
faced by our fathers in the 60s, by our grandfathers in the 30s, by our
great-grandfathers in the 1890s and by our great-great-grandfathers in
the 1860s. Once, in those four crises, the shrill were right, and the
country exploded in Civil War. You like the odds?
"These are the times that try men’s souls:
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the
service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks
of man and woman."
It’s the crisis which comes once in every generation. Everything is up in the air.
Embrace the unknown. You have no other choice.
