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Monday, August 7, 2006 | Silk and Stone I WOKE up from a dream this morning with the following words in my mind: "Gasoline is the silk and stone of freedom. Mistakenly attributed to Jack Kerouac." It might have meant less if one of the first emails I clicked on hadn't been a report on a new car being introduced by Tesla Motors by Mark Morford, everyone's favorite overwriter. This is a vast, powerful, luxurious car that runs without gasoline -- none at all. While it's true that electricity is usually made from gas, that does not have to be the case. Think of it this way. There are many sources of electric power but just one source of petroleum. Mark says in his column on SFGate.com: Oh my God do they ever lie. What we know from this is something anybody, like any little kid, could have told you: of course a really good electric car is possible. Once it's possible to produce one, you can mass produce (and this one is indeed in mass production). Once you can mass produce, you can figure out how to get the price down. That's how industry works. I remember when a four function (add, subtract, etc.) electronic calculator cost $300. In 1970s dollars! And of course they lie. The manufacturers [Monsanto, GE] of chemicals called PCBs, which coincidentally were used throughout the electric power grid for many decades, convinced Congress and federal regulators that if their disgustingly toxic, persistent, fetus-contaminating chemicals were taken off the market, the economy would go down like the Hindenburg, just like that. People actually think of this shit, and then they say it. That's like you telling your boss, "If you fire me, the state economy will collapse." Note, PCBs came off the market around 1978 and the lights are still on. Oil companies have been squashing new technology for decades. It's easy -- when you have more money than God, you just boy the patents of anything that might compete with you. So, under one humorous scenario, in the first 15 minutes after the world, somebody will look in the oil companies' files and confirm for sure they had the solution all along -- but instead chose to soak us in CO, CO2, heat, dust, dioxin and terrorism so they could make their million dollars an hour. Under another scenario, we start to invest in, and demand, and create, solutions. All of which need to be aimed at starving ExxonMobil into lavish retirement, and financing all kinds of solar options. I had a client in 2000 who said she had put all of her inherited money into solar energy stocks and didn't lose a dime during the market crash of spring 2000 that cost numerous people, such as my father, half his retirement fund. The moment Planet Waves has enough liquid capital to invest in anything beyond our publishing projects, that's where it's going -- solar. To say that there's an energy crisis on the Earth is the very definition of a manufactured crisis. All there is, is energy. The Sun shines most places every day. And hey I've been to this far-away exotic country called the Netherlands -- they have a lot of windmills there. Take that, Osama. I mean George. I mean Dick. Here's Mark's SFGate piece: http://snipurl.com/uj78 Here's bit on Tesla, a name everyone should know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla Here's the company making this sweet little $80G sports car: http://teslamotors.com/ | ||||||
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