The Plan by Edwin Black

Author:Edwin Black [BLACK, EDWIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-091415307-8
Publisher: Dialog Press

CHAPTER FIVE

Week Three — The Retrofitting Revolution

America’s current ability to save itself by retrofitting oil-dependent vehicles is bleak. Worse than bleak. Short-term driving restrictions, exhaustion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the many other special, seemingly onerous regulations of The Plan will be a fruitless re-arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic without the indispensable simultaneous program: retrofitting, now also called “upftting.”

Kicking the oil addiction means more than just buying spiffy new cars powered by batteries, hydrogen, CNG or numerous other alternatives. If the nation suddenly manufactures, and consumers then purchase, a million new electric, hydrogen, and CNG cars each month, at the end of a year more than 250 million gas guzzling vehicles will remain on the nation’s roads to continue drinking oil.

America and the world will require a crash retrofitting revolution to survive any traumatic shift off oil. But the country is completely unprepared to even start.

Retrofitting —or upftting—a vehicle can be a simple or complex operation, relatively cheap or expensive, quick or slow. It all depends upon the vehicle, the retrofitter, the vehicle’s intended use and the type of retrofit a vehicle will undergo. A pivotal question is upfit to what? What is the best choice: CNG, ethanol, methanol, electric or any of a dozen other varieties of alternative?

The mistake would be to dictate a fuel conversion or propulsion preference. The world’s alternative fuel possibilities for conversion are numerous. Many of them are well-entrenched, decades-old technologies, some more than a century old. We do not need to reinvent the wheel as much as exhume it from where it was buried during the 10 decades of the 20th century by corporate and political avarice. Just as guilty are a glissando of public policy failures that continue to reverberate like slow-motion shots heard around the world—traveling not at the speed of sound but the velocity of fog. Now we are enveloped in energy confusion with almost zero visibility. The key partner in this carefully stage-managed addiction has been the public itself. Society ratified Detroit’s prestiidigital misdirection. Gleefully, without a gun to its head, society followed Detroit’s piper toward the flashing lights and thumping music, adoring glitzy SUVs and the sexed-up yet reckless manufacture of the worst possible vehicles for a planet ever-conscious it was fast running out of oil. No one ever questioned the man behind the curtain. His elixir, the fume of internal combustion, was oh so intoxicating. The seats were plush. The stereo was surround sound. The sense of machismo became a cross-gender phenomenon.

But now the truth is known. We were purchasing our own predicament on the installment plan. The world is trapped in an oil line—no butting or departures allowed.

So to be free, when King Oil dies, we cannot hail: “The King is Dead, Long Live the King.” There shall be no new fuel king. The monarchy of petroleum will be replaced not with another dictator but with a fuel democracy. Fortunately, there are many contenders.

HYDROGEN could become the ultimate alternative fuel, especially when used in a hydrogen fuel cell.

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