"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else" Winston Churchill
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Larry Horsley loves that he doesn't buy much gas, even though he drives his '95 Chevy S-10 back and forth to work each day.
Horsley, a self-described do-it-yourselfer, simply plugs his truck into an electric wall outlet in his Douglasville, Georgia, garage and charges it overnight, instead of buying gasoline refined from mostly imported oil.
They're among a growing number of Americans who are refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles, called EVs. Not only have they rebelled against the status quo by ripping out their gas-guzzling engines and replacing them with zero-emission electric motors, they say just about anyone can do it.Can't sell your hulk of an SUV to replace it with a factory-fresh hybrid? Why not retrofit it? Backwoods American do-it-yourself ingenuity has finally come back out in the face of hardship.
I am against consumption. Why build new vehicles when we've got millions going to the scrap heap every day? Start a vehicle retrofitting business and begin converting the masses to new technology. It takes one person ~$10,000 for one car, but it may take a large organisation much less. Hell, offer financing options less than the equivalent price of fuel and I'm sure people would bite. Or God forbid-- we might have a government-led grant programme towards energy independence.
it would certainly be better than all the other aftermarket shit people do like chrome wheels and shopping-cart spoilers.
5 responses:
Most people don't know where 'lectricity comes from. Let me enlighten you:
48.9% Coal,
20.0% Natural Gas,
19.3% Nuclear,
7.1% Hydro,
2.4% Other Renewables,
1.6% Petroleum,
0.7% Other,
Coal << Petroleum, and you can bet your ass that as soon as everyone is sucking power from the grid that we'll have massive outages (again) and crazy price increases. Myopia sure is fun, though.
we should be using more of that other shit anyway.
build 30 new reactors, line the midwest with wind turbines and the desert with solar panels and we'd be SELLING excess energy
Depends on where you live. In Southern California, you can pretty much bet on your power coming from nuclear or hydroelectric sources.
That said, Uranium 238 is already in pretty short supply. It's only a matter of time until that stops being cost-effective as well.
Solar's the way to go in the long run.
Nuclear or Hydro, huh?
For SDG&E for 2006, nuclear is 15%, renewables are 8%, large hydro is 10%, coal is 18%, and natural gas is 50%. The renewable power is mainly wind at 3%, biomass at 3%, and geothermal at 2%.
ANONYMOUS, IDENTIFY YOURSELF!
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