I just read some news articles about the "hybrid revolution." Ah, what a relief that we have finally found a way to cut our consumption of fossil fuels! Just when we thought all hope was lost, along came Toyota and Chevy with their hybrid fuel-electric cars, and the day was saved! I mean, who can argue with 85 miles to the gallon, right?
Well, someone once told me that there's a cost to everything, and I think we might have finally run face-first into the hidden cost of hybrid cars: rare earth metals. For every hybrid manufactured approximately 2 lbs of rare metals are used in the magnets of the electric engine, and approximately 15-20 lbs of rare metals are required for the batteries. In all, there are 15 metals at issue, and the production of hybrid cars uses nearly 40,000 tons of these metals annually. So, what's the problem?
Well, quite simply rare metals are, well, rare. And expensive. Especially when the world's primary producer of these metals - China - is restricting exports of these elements to retain them for their own manufacturing needs. So, in "several years," whatever that means, you can expect shortages in the amount of these metals available to manufacturers of hybrid cars. Concordantly, you can expect the price of hybrid cars to go up and, if it gets tight enough, the number of hybrids produced each year to go down. So much for the hybrid revolution.
Allow me to suggest something that I may have said before - and forgive me if I am repeating myself, but a good idea should be shouted to the heavens until someone listens and takes action. ETHANOL! For God's sake, people, it's clean, it's renewable, and it's easy to make - cheap. If you're reading this, stop for a moment and Google "Coskata." Go to their web site and read about their process... Ok, so you did that? Now that we're on the same page, I'll continue. Three simple steps, right? Virtually unlimited sources from any kind of biomass imaginable, including garbage, tires, switch grass, wood chippings and mulch, underbrush and grass clippings. I mean, where in America do we not have these things? They're everywhere! And this process could be everywhere, but for the financial roadblocks that the company has encountered since its inception.
Coskata obtained much of its start-up funding from General Motors, which has recently filed bankruptcy and morphed into Government Motors. I'm sure this has hampered Coskata's efforts to get their plants operational. But the sooner they get established, the sooner this country can reap the benefits of a truly sustainable alternative energy.
The advantages of ethanol are tremendous, especially in the realm of transportation. Just consider, rather than sending millions of dollars to overseas car makers who produce new cars which run on completely new technology, we would have the preferable option of simply converting, at a much lower cost, the cars now on the road to run on the slightly different combustible fuel available in the form of ethanol. We already have internal combustion engines in all our vehicles; the means and materials to convert them to run on ethanol are simple, cheap and readily available. Made-in-the-USA manufacturing gets a boost from the conversions; the domestic auto mechanics' industry gets a boost from the conversion; everyone benefits, and the benefits stay in our economy, not China's. We become eco-friendly and self-sufficient, at least with respect to our fuel consumption, and we do it at far less cost to Americans than a full-fleet conversion to hybrid or electric cars. It's a win-win - for the economy, for the environment, and for national security. And no rare earth metals need be involved. So, we had the "Cash for Clunkers" program; now, Washington, may I suggest a real solution: A subsidy for Coskata and the rest of the struggling and neglected ethanol industry, coupled with a government program for Americans to convert their cars to ethanol. We could even call it "Cash for Conversions."
Until next time,
Discere Aude!
-Hephaestus
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
It's been too long, old friend...
Ok, so I haven't shown my face around these parts in a while. It's true, I got you all worked up, expecting to hear something extraordinary about our country's educational future, and then I didn't deliver. Well, I apologize, but before you write me off as not keeping my word, let me explain.
Here's the deal: Our country has one F***ked-up educational system; we all know this without any argument. But this fact begs a few questions, the first of which is, why? Option #1: Lack of better ideas.
Well, that's what I thought, too. I figured that if we could just devise a better system, we could fix the problems with the current one by replacing it. Then I did a bit of research - remember, I was going to write a book? And in my reading, I realized a frustrating truth: a thousand people have devised better systems, some of which have actually been put into practice in select schools around the country with great success. However, none of these bright hopes have been copied by state-wide education programs, and none of them have received Federal recognition or support. So the problem isn't a lack of better ideas, and we find ourselves back at square one: why? Why are these new and better programs not being implemented on a large scale?
It isn't lack of funding; we have spent FAR greater sums on projects of far less value and importance for decades. It isn't an inability on the part of legislators to reform the cumbersome, ensconced system of education as we know it; we changed the whole organization of national intelligence with just two acts of Congress - the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act - and we could do likewise with education... if we wanted to. And that's the point.
While many Americans - parents, teachers, school administrators - might hold true educational reform dear to their hearts, there is, in fact, a narrow class of people in this country who stand to lose a great deal in the wake of such revamping of our schools: politicians. Indeed, the very people who hold the power to reform our educational system have been benefiting from its dysfunction for generations. An educated civic body is a vigilant, involved civic body, and no politician can expect to advance an agenda of personal gain when he (or she) has to answer to a sharp, interested constituency. Voter fraud, gerrymandering, pork legislation, and any plethora of other ill-advised policy simply would not go over in that environment. Furthermore, the very prevalent "politics of fear" that has found such frequent use this past decade would be, to an educated public, little more than a hollow shill - which is, for the most part, exactly what it is. On the other hand, these underhanded political tactics and rancid policy decisions go over without a hitch with a public that is ignorant, distracted and struggling to keep their heads above water. As long as the people of this country have it hard, the politicians have an easy time getting by with whatever seems most politically expedient to them. I don't have to spell it out any more, it's an easy picture to get. Dumb people are suckers, and if the politicians can let our broken educational system turn out ten thousand undereducated, unenlightened suckers a year, that's ten thousand less people that those politicians will have to seriously answer to in the next election. It's that simple, and that's why educational reform isn't seriously pushed in the marble halls of government.
Now, I know all of this is "mere speculation," backed up by little more than circumstantial evidence and a logical analysis of the history of powerful people and the corruption of governments, but the real story isn't in the ways that we could make our educational system better. For more than sixty years bright minds, both academic and professional, have been offering us alternative methods for better educating our youth; we have a veritable cornucopia of "new" and better ideas at our fingertips. The real story is in the truth about the roadblocks to reform - about the political expediency of letting America's educational system fail year after year; about the backroom politics that whitewash every renewed attempt to institute genuine change in education; about the benefit of an uneducated public for those who hold power in our country.
I say all of this in an attempt to justify why I never posted the remaining installments in the series of blog entries that I set out at the beginning. Maybe my reasoning is nothing more to you, my readers, than an excuse for my laziness or apathy. If that is how you see it, then so be it, that's your prerogative. I know, however, the general bent of the evidence that I encountered in my research, and I wish only that I had the resources and time to devote to proving my suspicions. Unfortunately, I do not. I can only hope that my brief exposition here will pique the interest of some who, unlike myself, do have the time and resources to invest in such an investigation. In the meantime, I will devote myself to other endeavors which I find my personal attributes more keenly aligned toward.
For now, it's good to be back.
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
Here's the deal: Our country has one F***ked-up educational system; we all know this without any argument. But this fact begs a few questions, the first of which is, why? Option #1: Lack of better ideas.
Well, that's what I thought, too. I figured that if we could just devise a better system, we could fix the problems with the current one by replacing it. Then I did a bit of research - remember, I was going to write a book? And in my reading, I realized a frustrating truth: a thousand people have devised better systems, some of which have actually been put into practice in select schools around the country with great success. However, none of these bright hopes have been copied by state-wide education programs, and none of them have received Federal recognition or support. So the problem isn't a lack of better ideas, and we find ourselves back at square one: why? Why are these new and better programs not being implemented on a large scale?
It isn't lack of funding; we have spent FAR greater sums on projects of far less value and importance for decades. It isn't an inability on the part of legislators to reform the cumbersome, ensconced system of education as we know it; we changed the whole organization of national intelligence with just two acts of Congress - the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act - and we could do likewise with education... if we wanted to. And that's the point.
While many Americans - parents, teachers, school administrators - might hold true educational reform dear to their hearts, there is, in fact, a narrow class of people in this country who stand to lose a great deal in the wake of such revamping of our schools: politicians. Indeed, the very people who hold the power to reform our educational system have been benefiting from its dysfunction for generations. An educated civic body is a vigilant, involved civic body, and no politician can expect to advance an agenda of personal gain when he (or she) has to answer to a sharp, interested constituency. Voter fraud, gerrymandering, pork legislation, and any plethora of other ill-advised policy simply would not go over in that environment. Furthermore, the very prevalent "politics of fear" that has found such frequent use this past decade would be, to an educated public, little more than a hollow shill - which is, for the most part, exactly what it is. On the other hand, these underhanded political tactics and rancid policy decisions go over without a hitch with a public that is ignorant, distracted and struggling to keep their heads above water. As long as the people of this country have it hard, the politicians have an easy time getting by with whatever seems most politically expedient to them. I don't have to spell it out any more, it's an easy picture to get. Dumb people are suckers, and if the politicians can let our broken educational system turn out ten thousand undereducated, unenlightened suckers a year, that's ten thousand less people that those politicians will have to seriously answer to in the next election. It's that simple, and that's why educational reform isn't seriously pushed in the marble halls of government.
Now, I know all of this is "mere speculation," backed up by little more than circumstantial evidence and a logical analysis of the history of powerful people and the corruption of governments, but the real story isn't in the ways that we could make our educational system better. For more than sixty years bright minds, both academic and professional, have been offering us alternative methods for better educating our youth; we have a veritable cornucopia of "new" and better ideas at our fingertips. The real story is in the truth about the roadblocks to reform - about the political expediency of letting America's educational system fail year after year; about the backroom politics that whitewash every renewed attempt to institute genuine change in education; about the benefit of an uneducated public for those who hold power in our country.
I say all of this in an attempt to justify why I never posted the remaining installments in the series of blog entries that I set out at the beginning. Maybe my reasoning is nothing more to you, my readers, than an excuse for my laziness or apathy. If that is how you see it, then so be it, that's your prerogative. I know, however, the general bent of the evidence that I encountered in my research, and I wish only that I had the resources and time to devote to proving my suspicions. Unfortunately, I do not. I can only hope that my brief exposition here will pique the interest of some who, unlike myself, do have the time and resources to invest in such an investigation. In the meantime, I will devote myself to other endeavors which I find my personal attributes more keenly aligned toward.
For now, it's good to be back.
Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
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