9/11, ten years later
On this day ten years ago I was fighting my way through morning rush-hour traffic, going to an out-of-town plant to work on some production issues. After getting through the worst of it, I stopped for refreshment and another motorist told me that a small plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I switched from the CD player to the radio, and listened the rest of the way as the horror unfolded. By the time I got live TV coverage, the towers had collapsed. The TVs at rest stops showed the smoking rubble all day.
At my destination, people were desperately filling up every gasoline container they could find. I saw two men with a trailer full of brand-new 5-gallon cans, filling them all. I filled my car with enough fuel to get me through the week and home again. I had hoped to get a New York Times the following morning. I don't think I saw one that whole week.
The lack of contrails in the sky was eerie.
The agents behind the first (failed) WTC attack, and the suicide nature of the successful one, suggested strongly that it came from Islamists, specifically Al Qaeda. This was later proven; the attackers were from the Middle East, all Muslim, 15 of the 19 from Saudi Arabia. Our so-called "friends" there killed roughly 3000 people that day, mostly Americans, on American soil. Yet there was zero political response to this in Washington; while illegal Pakistani immigrants received a lot of attention and many returned home abruptly, the Saudi royal family was treated with kid gloves.
Nothing has changed in that respect. The US government has, against all reason, expanded allowances for Saudi immigration. Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was admitted to the US in 1999 (after the first WTC attack) and granted US citizenship in 2009!
US immigration and citizenship policy is somewhere between reckless and suicidal. The question everyone should be asking is "Why?", followed immediately by "How do we fix it?"
It's easy to see why. The answer is "oil money". We have done precious little to wean ourselves off oil since 9/11 (Congress and the Bush administration continued policies of guzzler promotion for years after the attacks), and all those dollars flowing to Riyadh and Caracas and Kuwait flow back as political influence. We're not buying oil with dollars or grain, we're handing over control of our government.
It's imperative to cut US dependency on oil. The price of oil wouldn't matter to the economy if there wasn't an effective "petro-state tax" on most people just to get to work. I did what I could in 2004, when I cut my fuel needs by about 1/3. But today I'd find it hard to do that again. I'd need to get up to 60 MPG or so, and there are precious few vehicles sold in the USA which can do that. The Volt (sold out for months) is good for a couple iterations of this game and the latest Prius is in the ballpark, but the Fusion hybrid barely ekes out the mileage I often get today.
We've done practically nothing. We've continued to hand money and power to the people who've proven they will use it to do us harm. If it were only our elites I'd say it was treason, but sentiment among ordinary Americans is the same. See no evil, and drain the retirement account to fill up the pickup to take the toy-hauler and the 4-wheelers out for a weekend on the trails.
Fixing this requires a complete 180 in attitude. Oil must be treated as a necessary evil, but an evil. Guzzling vehicles and wasteful driving must be subject to both fines and social opprobrium. We need the PNGV or something like it back pronto, expanded production of all supply-chain components for hybrids and PHEVs (preferably all sited in the USA), feebates, higher gas taxes, the works. We can't manage a full war footing yet, but we need urgent action NOW. That attitude shift would help fix the flow of dangerous immigrants as well. We should have no Faisal Shahzads or Umar Abdulmutallabs or even Richard Reids coming into the USA.
I don't see this happening. Anyone who advocates any of the necessary changes is immediately stigmatized as "anti-American" (like R. James Woolsey?) or "islamophobic" (which is only half a step from "racist"). There's a stone wall, maintained by both major political parties, against making the changes we urgently needed to make starting on that clear sunny day ten years ago.
If this country doesn't wake up and get a clue, we're doomed.
Labels: 9/11, editorial, GM Volt, government incompetence, petroleum dependence, PHEV, PNGV, taxes
¶ 9/11/2011 12:39:00 PM 1 comments
Stick a fork in Freedom Car... it's done
Roughly 100 days into the Obama administration, Steven Chu has announced that the hydrogen fuel cell will not be a practical power source for cars in the next 10-20 years and does not merit the emphasis placed on it. Funds for vehicle development have accordingly been cut off.
That didn't take long. (Pity Europe was 3 years ahead of us, but better late than never.)
Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles always had a long list of barriers to widespread use:
- Hydrogen itself is easiest to make from fossil fuels; renewable hydrogen is a much tougher problem.
- There is nothing like a national network to distribute hydrogen, unlike electricity and natural gas. This would have to be built from scratch, or hydrogen made from something else near the point of use. If hydrogen is made from something else, there is no "hydrogen economy".
- Hydrogen is very difficult to store; the target for hydrogen storage systems is just 7% by weight.
- Low-temperature fuel cells, such as Proton-Exchange Membrane (PEM) cells, are expensive to manufacture, touchy about operating conditions and rather short-lived regardless.
It might be reasonable to expect one of these problems to fall to an intensive R&D program in a reasonable period. But four of them? When two of them are completely intractable matters of physics or infrastructure? Freedom Car was a boondoggle from day one, never intended to get anywhere.
Unfortunately, Detroit appears to have gone into the crapper with it. We have lost 8 years, during which peak oil has come and gone. Had we stayed the course, we would have had PNGV vehicles on sale 2-3 years ago. A robust American program to produce cars that achieved 70+ MPG would have enjoyed huge popularity as fuel headed for $5/gallon, and the parts business (especially batteries) would have perhaps kept the Chinese company BYD out of auto manufacturing.
What to do now? I still think independent investigations and trials on charges up to and including high treason are appropriate on this matter (and others). But scrapping our gas-guzzlers and converting the plants which made them to HEV, PHEV and EV production and other manufacturing (such as wind turbines) should top the list of initiatives to start immediately.
Labels: Freedom Car, fuel cell, hydrogen, PEM, PNGV
¶ 5/14/2009 10:58:00 PM 0 comments
Immediate responses: Revive the PNGV
Up until about 4 years ago, the USA had a program to develop ultra-high mileage vehicles. The goal of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) was to produce full-size passenger cars achieving 80 miles per gallon. Prototypes such as Chrysler's ESX-3 were achieving 72 MPG at a projected cost premium of roughly $3500. Delivery of the first production models was set for 2008-2009.
This program, on which about a billion dollars had been spent, was cancelled by the Republican majority. As a consolation prize, we got... another research program, but aimed at hydrogen vehicles. This effort is not projected to yield cost-competitive vehicles for another 15 years or more, and the viability of hydrogen vehicles is questionable when natural gas (the cleanest feedstock) is plummeting in production and skyrocketing in price.
There ought to be a groundswell of support for bringing back the PNGV. Amazingly, there are people involved in the energy discussion who have never heard of it. This boggles my mind.
The PNGV could have been a strike, but it was mis-thrown by the right and wound up as a gutter ball. Is it time for a letter-writing campaign to our legislators, newspapers, and others to at least try for a spare?Labels: petroleum dependence, PNGV
¶ 10/07/2005 12:11:00 PM 15 comments
