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Thursday, November 7, 2002 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"The U.S. will hold the distinction of being the only Nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile."
- - Will Rogers
RHINO HERE:
Confession. When I sent out yesterday's Blog, I knew the general outcome of the elections, but I just wasn't ready to react. Sickish. Reeling again. Wellstone's death and now a wave of GOP wins. Like double punches to the solar plexus from Mohammed Ali. The pendulum continues its swing right.
I thank those of you who've written encouraging me to keep on keeping on. I promise not to "join em if u cant beat em", even though I had a half waking 4 A.M.ish moment Tuesday night imagining myself in an Earl Scheib painted red, white & blue Lincoln Navigator.
But seriously, shrub & company will claim what happened as their mandate to do anything they want. It should be duly noted that less than 20% of the American electorate voted for Republican candidates, nearly as many voted against them, and far more were so uninspired, they stayed home. Given that, there is no mandate from what can be called "The American People".
So as the old saying born in Austin Texas goes, "Onward Through The Fog".
Last month, shrub & co went to court supporting the auto industry's effort to eliminate requirements in California that auto manufacturers sell electric cars. No surprise shrub's chief of staff, Andrew Card was chief lobbyist for General Motors, one of the plaintiffs in the case? He was also head of an auto industry trade association when California proposed to require electric vehicles and has publicly opposed such a requirement. Under California clean air rules, 10 percent of the vehicles sold in the 2003 to 2008 model years must be electric or "zero-emission vehicles."
Even when the state recognized that the car companies were not ready to meet that goal and offered to let them sell hybrid vehicles to satisfy part of the requirement, it wasn't good enough. The industry, wanting to avoid having quotas at all, sued the state, arguing that the hybrid provision violated federal law, and shrub's team back them saying the substitution would regulate fuel economy standards, over which the federal government holds exclusive jurisdiction. For more on this story, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/10/politics/10POLL.html
Meanwhile I, like most Americans, was unaware that while the U.K. is an oil refining country with a powerful oil lobby, Germany doesn't refine oil and in fact, many Germans are using recycled cooking oil in their cars. It's true! Below is an excerpt from an article by Thom Hartmann, author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," a book about corporate influence of government.
http://www.unequalprotection.com
The article tells of autos with sweet smelling vegetable oil exhaust. Try that in London and you'll get locked up. Mr. Hartmann is also the author of "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight", about the end of the era of oil.
http://www.thomhartmann.com
RELATED LINKS
HYBRID CARS
http://www.hybrid-cars.com
VEGGIE OIL CARS
http://www.veggievan.org/
8:14:28 AM 
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by Thom Hartmann, November 1, 2002
...the real money these days is in oil, since there's only about a 30- to 50-year supply of it left on the planet, and thus it's starting to rapidly increase in value. Unless, of course, you're talking about cooking oil.
"Your car's exhaust smells like french fries," I said to Samuel Mueller as he drove me from the train station in Kulmbach, Germany. "It's because it's running on oil, possibly recycled from a restaurant," Samuel said. "It's a diesel engine modified to run on vegetable oil."
Interestingly, here in Germany you can buy "bio-diesel" or recycled vegetable oil at gas stations, while in England people who modify their diesel cars to run on vegetable oil are vilified and even prosecuted. Germans broadly oppose seizing the oil fields of Iraq, which are estimated to be the largest in the world, or, at worse, second only to Saudi Arabia, while Tony Blair is Europe's main (and, perhaps, only) cheerleader for former oil-industry CEO Bush's war plans.
Germany is not an oil-producing nation, and the typical German consumes less than half the overall energy and oil of the typical American. The German government offers incentives to architects and companies to design and build energy-efficient or even energy-producing (as in active or passive solar, etc.) buildings, and public transportation (particularly the train system) is cheap, efficient, and very well maintained.
England is an oil-producing nation, and the oil lobby in the UK, like in the USA, is powerful. In England using french-fry oil to power your car is considered unpatriotic, and can even land you in court. At the same time, securing the oil of the Middle East, perhaps with England's biggest oil companies as partners in the pumping consortium that will undoubtedly come out of an Iraqi war effort, is promoted to the British public by the corporate-owned British newspapers and similarly corporate-loyal UK politicians. Meanwhile, the British rail system is a mess, and their highways are hopelessly clogged with cars, cars, and more cars. All running on fossil oil....
THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IS LOCATED AT:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1101-07.htm
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law ( http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ).
All copyrights belong to original publisher.
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8:06:23 AM
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