[V8] Diesels, Hydrogen, Hybrids, Continued!....or CONSERVATION!

[Roger M. Woodbury]

Conservation.  Ah yes, that magic term embraced the nation over  by fuzzy
headed liberals and various other varieties of tree huggers.   Here and
there throughout the past four or five decades from time to time the not so
fuzzy headed or tree hugging politicians have embraced the concept from time
to time when they needed that sometimes "green" stamp on their resume.  
 
But it basically doesn't work as an energy or fuels concept because there
are several cultural things that are necessary for conservation to work in
the real world.  
 
First of all, there needs be an educated electorate in the mass. That is to
say there needs be an electorate who are realistically educated to
understand the way the world works, the way people function and are on a
global basis, not on some wishful fantasy basis based on someone's
politically correct image of the way things should be.  Gradually, we have
been abandonning the truth in the educational process in this country for
about two and one half decades, rewriting history, and subsitituting liberal
education content for type specific education for the masses, group think
for individual evaluative process.  President Obama said it himself in a
recent speed...."we need more engineers....and people to go to school to get
good jobs...."  Sounds good, but is basically a flawed concept:  the goal of
education is not to help someone JUST get a good job.
 
So Conservation as a theory is fine.  So long as it is embraced by the
political will and supported by the electorate and conservation goals are
funded continually through the political process.  It is not so now, and in
these particulal social, economic and political times, conservation is about
number ten seventy on everyone's list of priorities.  
 
Let's take for example, a simple mass involved concept like recycling of
what has always been considered disposables:  metal cans.  How many
political subdivisions in the US have can and bottle recycling laws?  How
many of those actually work?  
 
Here in Maine we have an aluminum beverage can and glass bottle recycling
law.  The law applies only to consumable beverage containers, leaving out
the tens of thousands of other types of aluminum, metal, glass and plastic
containers as well as many beverage containers for consumables that are
considered "essential"...fruit juices and milk, for example.  The way the
law works is that an additional deposit is paid at the point of purchase on
each container.  Five cents for beer and non-alcoholic beverages, and
fifteen cents for "hard" alcohol.  When those containers are redeemed at a
redemption center, the purchaser gets his fifteen or five cents back.  Well
and good.  
 
The law is inadequate and continually in trouble, is poorly supported by the
grocery stores, and the side benefit of establishing at low cost a whole
chain of independetnt recycling centers for entrepreneurs has given rise to
a bureacracy for administration at the state level.  There is lobbying by
the grocery folks for modification or repeal of the law on an annual basis,
and while most people seem to support the return of redeemables, there
remain hundreds of thousands of cans and bottles NOT covered by the law,
still going into the diminishing number of landfills throughout the state.
And Maine has one of the more aggressive and successful redemption laws in
the nation.
 
And to be a bit more on topic, we have a whole bunch of schemes directed at
selling cars that embrace the general concept of conservation.  But
conservation is a misnomer, because the truth is that the development of the
internal combustion engine is stalled somewhere between 1950 and 1960 and
the real world conservation of gasoline through "improved" fuel and engine
management systems in the private passenger automobile are no where toward
true conservation.  While it is true that the automobile industry is
trending toward smaller vehicles, the technology that drives them is much th
esame, year over year as it was ten years ago.  The "improvements" in
efficiency are much the byproduct of more layers of technology and added
cost, but the real result is not much interms of consumption.  If there
really was a conservationist push behind the issue of transporation, huge
vehicles for private passenger use would have a real tax on them at the
Federal and State level that would discourage such vehicles in favor of
smaller ones that actually deliver reduction in consumption.  
 
Let's take the ubiqutious pickup truck as an example of how the conservation
concept has not really been embraced by the automobile driving public.
 
The pickup truck is arguably the most useful variety of motorvehicle being
produced.  In four dooor form, it carries six adults with room for enough
packages of gizzies to last those six adults for a month's camping in some
far off place.  It is also the most inefficient and wasteful example of our
total disregard for conservation yet devised, aside from a "so-called" SUV
built on the same platform.  
 
Basically the automobile industry is producing the same pickup truck that it
produced back in Henry Ford's day.  The vehicle has an engine mounted in the
front with its transmission and a long driveshaft turning the rear wheels
through the same kind of pinion arrangement, or differential that was used
at the dawn of the "modern" automobile.  The engine in the front is a huge
multicylinder affair, arranged in either a six, eight or ten cylinder array
in a "V" shape.  There are around twelve inches of wasted space between the
engine and humanity due to outmoded design and engineering concepts
incorporated in the glitzy front ends of these vehicles.  
 
I wonder why it is that no one had yet been able or willing to produce a
light utility vehicle that has a relatively simple four cylinder engine
mounted beneath the center of the vehicle?  The configuration would shorten
the vehicle by three or four feet while still providing the cargo and
passenger capacity of the modern pickup.  While a pickup needs to have a
certain GVW rating in order to meet the needs of trades people and those
private owners who pull trailers and the like, I see no good reason why the
ONLY kind of pick up is an antique design, using the most expensive and
consumpitive propulsion systems devised for private transportation.  I have
no idea what such a fleet of light and medium duty pickups would yield in
terms of conservation of fuel, but I do know that such a concept will be
nigh onto impossible to implement because it will require the kind of
leadership at the legislative level that simply doesn't exist.  
 
And that is at the crux of the issue.  The great masses of population must
embrace the concept that a problem exists before they can be motivated to DO
SOMETHING about it.  The World Trade Center was brought down, and the great
unwashed masses, with their low level of general education embraced the
concept that we needed to send tens of thousands off to fight someone,
somewhere, and then largely forgot about it because their son or daughter
wasn't one of those sent off to sacrifice a leg, eye or life killing someone
else.  
 
The cost of fuel has risen through the roof and there are periodic
predictions that we will see gasoline prices on the same level as Europe
before long, yet we still produce the same kind of vehicle and consume at
least as much gasoline and fuel oils as before. The politicians argue about
more drilling, but few are advancing the concept of conservation on a broad
basis.  Those little redemption centers scattered throughout Maine are still
little more than private garages with lines of cardboard boxes into which
containers are pitched while customers wait for there eighty-five cents in
redemtion fees, and the masses of aluminium, plastic and steel conainers
still fill trash bags pitched into the solid waste disposal centers from
which they are hauled to a giant burial ground.
 
Here in the US, we have not embraced conservation as a fundamental need
within our civilization. When President Obama spoke a week ago, he spoke
with the general voice of a civilization:  restoration of the economy of the
US means people will have jobs that will pay them money so they can go forth
and consume more stuff.  Consistently lacking in the political rhetoric of
all the political spectra of this nation is the concept of conservation.  It
is far sexier to promise the development of new technologies that will
allow, no encourage, people to go forth and consume even more and more
stuff, all the while buring more and more fuel.  Until and unless there
becomes a national political will to do so, conservation is a failed concept
in search of a leader.  
 
And we don't produce leaders who do much except tell most people what they
want to hear, rather than the truth.
 
Roger