Automobile industry needs to change gears

Automobile industry needs to change gears:

In introductory remarks to his first press conference, President-elect Barack Obama on November 7, 2008 said, “The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing.”  Automobile manufacturing and the requisite system of busy roads are an essential part of the nation’s economic system, however the nation also needs a new and improved electrical transmission highway that is so packed full of electrons that the nation can go totally electric.

The large manufacturing capacity of organizations like GMC, Ford and Chrysler and its labor force is an essential part of our economy whether they are producing cars for private use or as in World War II addressing a national need by manufacturing tanks, planes, ships, munitions, SPAM and more.

Today, more economic and social activity whizzes around our nation and the world via electrons bouncing around in computers, cell phones, HDTVs, and on the web than travel by car down the highways and byways of the nation.  The automobile is as important today as footwear long has been, but it is of no more or less importance that flip-flops, uggs or old-fashioned lace-ups.  They help us get around and get around we must---but not always.

Our major industry needs to turn a part of its production capacity to the manufacture of equipment that produces a plentiful supply of electrons, and thus enable the nation to go totally electric by capturing and utilizing the same energy that over the eons turned an accumulating biomass into fossil deposits.  This is the sun, wind and gravity that are a free natural resource, which transports them selves for nothing and will provide power for the nation’s largest consumption need: fixed-place facilities such as homes, factories and other public structures.  It is far more economical to bounce electrons back and forth at 60 cycles than to find, fight over, mine, transport, refine, distribute, market, consume and dispose of the waste of fossil fuels.

To accommodate going totally electric, the nation needs a new energy grid that facilitates the dispersed production of electricity from wind turbines, parabolic-mirror solar concentrators, sea and surf displacement generators, and thermal wells.  This system needs to have a peak-plus capacity; the plus power being used for the online electrolytic production of hydrogen for fuel cell and turbine electrical generation when the skies are cloudy or dark, and the wind and sea are still.  Electricity from thermal wells is continuous and, when combined with heat captured as a byproduct of smelting ore, casting metals and disposing of waste, has an estimated capacity to generate up to a third of the nation’s current electrical needs.

The development of this infrastructure is essential if this nation is to once again provide American citizens with personally meaningful, financially rewarding and culturally beneficial jobs, management positions, and investment/ownership opportunities.  Electric power inexpensively delivered to individuals and organization will provide the foundation of real wealth that underwrites value for some of the flimsy paper floating around in Wall Street’s house of cards.  Regardless of how much money is poured into the investment funnel, value is not going to trickle down to give this nation’s citizens the opportunity to work at the American Dream and enjoy its bounty. 

To right the current economic mess, we need to look beyond upping the seasonal sale of consumer goods and toying with the market.  The nation needs to invest in what foundations the production of all goods and services---human and physical energy.  Doing this will put money in the pockets of consuming workers and provide low cost power to the business and industrial community that will find it of great economic benefit to stay and produce within our shores.

How quickly must the nations go totally electric? Within the same time period that it took the Greatest Generation to turn America into the Arsenal of Democracy: one four-year term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration.  At the dawn of World War II, FDR called his war production advisors together and informed them that he want American industry to produce 4,000 airplanes per month.  Some demurred and insisted that it would take a year, but FDR persisted and in a short time the nation was producing 4,000 a month and they made some of the older aircraft look like kites.  In addition, the nation produced thousand of tons of trucks, tanks, ships, munitions, SPAM and two things that citizens had never even hear of before, atomic bombs.

With a supply of electrical power that is almost free, what might the future show us: overhead trolley cables above interstates that let semi-trucks secure long-haul power, home greenhouses that facilitate the growing of edibles, heat produced inexpensively enough to feasibly produce biofuels from non-edibles, plug-ins on parking meters to charge battery powered hybrid cars, and maybe a free power lunch on a National Electrification Day commemorating the capture of electricity from the sun, wind and gravity at a cost only marginally more expensive than the air we breath.

The Army Corps of Engineers and Combat Engineers in the challenging times of World War II had a motto that well reflected the can-do-spirit that made the WW II arming of America possible, “The difficult we do today, the impossible will take a little longer.”  Aside from deciding to take the nation totally electric, there is nothing about the task that is comparably difficult or close to impossible as was that faced at the dawn of World War II---yes we can.