The Environmental Protection Agency has just announced that cars will have to meet a 54.5 miles-per-gallon goal by 2025.
There is no way that the automotive industry can meet this goal unless the cars are made much more expensive by using costly lightweight materials. Furthermore, they will have to be much smaller, and they will be unsafe in a crash with a truck, bus, tree, or telephone pole.
Electric cars are not the answer. Just to recharge one of today’s under-powered electric cars takes half the electricity that it takes to power the average house for a day.
And if battery capacity is improved, it will take that much more power to recharge them. Wind, solar and tides cannot begin to supply the amounts of energy we need for this. We do not have nearly the generating capacity, nor do we have the grid, to handle this demand.
But there is a silver lining in all of this. An unintended outcome of this is that this law will force the automotive industry to move to cars powered by our own 100-year supply of natural gas!
Better yet, transitioning to natural gas will generate hundreds of thousands of real jobs, boost tax revenues by billions of dollars, and allow us to stop sending $400 billion of our money every year to other countries, most of which hate us.
The state of Virginia just announced that it is transitioning its entire state vehicle fleet of 15,000 vehicles to natural gas. There are already 15 million vehicles around the world running on it. Check this out. www.cngnow.com
Kenneth W. Weigel
Edmonds
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