Today we learn the General Motors only has enough cash to stay in business through January or February 2009.  Their only chance for survival is government guaranteed access to money (of course, that means we the people are providing the guaranty).

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1153876820081111

GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz was scheduled to attend the LA (Auto) show to make an announcement about the company’s development of the all-electric Chevrolet Volt. -Reuters

So the first casualty of the cash crisis at GM will be the much ballyhooed technological wonder, the Chevrolet Volt.  From gas friendly to gas free?  Not too likely.

The reason we aren’t driving Chevrolet Volts (or advanced EV1 s, GM’s first electric car) is because we needed to develop advanced lithium ion batteries.  Endependence says BUNK!

Who Killed the Electric Car the first time?  Here is the trailer from the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGG4rNMuMac

There is no mystery about who killed GM’s electric car this time.  They never intended to build it in the first place.

Why did GM need breakthrough lithium ion battery technology for the Chevy Volt when they already had proven that lead acid batteries would work quite well with the EV1 project?  Because they had to build a $40,000.00 electric car that would require $7,500.00 in tax credits to even get in the neighborhood of affordability.

There are electric cars that you can buy right now that cost less than $14,000.00 out the door.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq_a1uyHHxQ

These cars didn’t and don’t need breakthrough technology.

Waiting for breakthrough technology is a way for business to delay needed action.  A lithium ion battery for electric cars, clean coal technology,  coal liquifaction with carbon sequestration - the breakthroughs we need to move to energy independence?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022903390.html

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/9/1201/93022/473/657536

Again, endependence says, BUNK!!

Have you noticed that when you see pizza ads on T.V., the bigger the pizza, the lower the price?  You can get a lot of bad pizza for $9.95, but can you survive on lots of bad pizza?

What if you fed the family cheap bad pizza every night for dinner?  It might be good for the budget, but soon the health effects of a lousy diet would start to show.  It wouldn’t be long until everyone decided that the cheap bad pizza diet wasn’t working.

When society was choosing energy sources during the industrial revolution, cheap was good.  Oil and coal were less expensive than whale oil and wood.  But like with pizza, cost is not the best way to judge the value of an energy source.

With energy, we have lots of cheap bad fuel choices. We have coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas.  This stuff is cheap because there is so much of it (especially coal), and the energy yield of fossil fuels is very high.

Here is a good outline of how fossil fuels formed:

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

There are a couple of problems with the cheap bad fuel choices.  First of all is the fact that they are non renewable, so eventually we will run out of them (all of the pizza places will close, and there won’t be any frozen pizzas either).  Second is the fact that as with eating pizza for dinner every night, burning fossil fuels has unhealthy side effects.  They release greenhouse gases which are a cause of global warming and they release other toxins into the air.

A scientist friend of mine explained it to me this way - “it took the earth millions of years to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we are in the process of putting it all back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years”.

Here is a video about the different types of fuels we are using currently:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-6.html

What we need is a more balanced energy diet.  We can use fossil fuels sparingly.  But we need to add lots more renewable energy to our plates (think of renewable energy as fruits and vegetables).

Renewable energy sources may not be as cheap as fossil fuels, but in the long run we will be much healthier when we change our cheap bad fuel choice diet.