Run Cars on Green Electricity, Not Natural Gas

The author of this article must have a bias against the internal combustion engine. Natural gas burns pretty clean. America has plenty according to the government. Increased demand will bring more online and more online will lower the price.

The problem with electric vehicle propulsion is that electric will not power over the road tractor trailer rigs. These trucks consume 70 % of all our petroleum imports. The economy cannot dispense with our heavy transport vehicles.

Electric powered vehicles cannot possibly replace the heavy trucks in the economy any more than batteries can replace rockets on the space shuttle. Its physically impossible. The author of the article should explain how electric batteries can power our transport fleet. Cars and light trucks use less than 30% of our oil imports. What about the other 70% of the economy?

Mother Earth editors should vett their articles better. The magazine's bias is showing.

We don't have enough green energy to make the electricity needed for car batteries. Obama's energy plan to "double wind and solar energy" over the next 10 years would take us from 1% to 2% of energy production.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States

That's just a drop in the bucket and will do nothing to address the US future energy needs or to wean us off of foreign crude. Instead of calling wind and solar "alternative energy," they should be called "supplemental energy."

The only green energy available to generate the kind of electricity needed would be from nuclear power plants and from hydroelectric plants. I have a hunch you don't consider those green.

The answer for the first half of this century will be to diversify our vehicle fleet. Mandating that federal vehicles run on natural gas would be a start. ATT announced they'll be buying 8,000 natural gas vehicles. Oklahoma is considering a bill to mandate that their state and municipal entities buy natural gas powered cars, and make the fueling stations available to the public.

That's a start. Large companies, states and local governments will have to act on their own if the Obama administration won't. As oil prices climb back over $50 on production cuts from OPEC, the world will find itself again held hostage for oil. OPEC is making plans to capture a large share of the trillions in stimulus dollars. It'd be nice to see the US put our collective foot down and say "No more!"

There is NO "green electricity" available to me and probably won't be in the foreseeable future. Yet there is natural gas available that IS NOT a "fossil fuel" generated by my local treatment plant.

Pushing for electric vehicles will only result in more environmental problems. Mining of lithium and cadmium and other more exotic and toxic chemicals are hardly environmentally benign, yet they are necessary to power electric vehicles. Electric transmission looses nearly 50% of the energy in transmission, and even more in conversion to battery power. The result: more burning of coal.

Natural gas (methane) can and has been generated from organic waste for decades in quantities sufficient to be commercially viable. Most modern garbage dumps actually harvest natural gas. Much of the natural gas that comes from drilling is actually from biologic sources, referred to as biogenic gas. This natural gas is often found by testing at the surface for seeps- in other words it is escaping into the atmosphere slowly anyway, and is contributing to the current atmospheric content of greenhouse gases.

Your premise is wrong, as you are sadly uninformed about the subject.