America’s response to $4 gas has been to demand that government do something to bring the price down. Instead, we should demand that government do much more to end our dependence on imported oil.
President Barack Obama is moving — in herks and jerks — in that direction. He has set a goal of putting a million electric cars on the road by 2015. It’s a doable thing, as long as the goal is kept realistic by including cars that run on batteries until that power source is exhausted and then automatically shift to an internal combustion engine — as the Prius does and the Volt will.
Putting cars like the Chevy Volt on the road will cut gasoline consumption dramatically. Most Americans commute 40 miles a day or fewer. A Volt driver will use gasoline only when traveling farther. Reducing gasoline consumption will bring prices down.
To move faster toward that million-car goal, electric cars should be subsidized even higher than they are today. Well-designed subsidies would result in substantial increases in sales and bring down prices as the economies of volume production are realized.
Government investments in energy research and development should also be in-creased.
Seth Fletcher, a senior editor at Popular Science and author of “Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars and the New Lithium Economy,” re-ported in Tuesday’s New York Times that, “today, at universities like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in national laboratories like Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley, scientists are developing technologies that could power a post-oil age — batteries nearly as rich in usable energy as gasoline, which would make cars like the Volt, with their gas-burning backup engines, historical artifacts.
“If we gut domestic clean-energy research, scientists in China or Germany or Japan will finish this work. But it would be far better to stick with the program we’ve begun — financing research into better batteries while deploying vehicles that replace gasoline with electricity as much as possible — and prove that when it comes to energy, America can, in fact, learn from its mistakes.”
Go electric is the answer to $4 gas
