I'm what you could call a GM baby. Dad was an engineer for GM at the old AC Spark Plug turned Delco Electronics plants once in Milwaukee by North and Farwell and then in Oak Creek. As a child I remember Dad bringing home pamphlets. Some I would read, some were of no interest to a child. A child never thinks about it but now that I am a grandfather and my parents have passed on, I realize how well GM took care of their employees. Even after Dad passed away, GM continued to take care of Mom. And this is why GM and Ford are in the trouble that they are in now.  Toyota, Subaru and others never had the long term relationship with employees or benefits negotiated by labor unions. Not strapped with pensions and US automaker level benefits, it was not a level playing field and we as a country have suffered for it while we drive these cars build by foreign owned companies.

GM and Ford did for their employees what the country has voted for the government to do for all. The same can be said of Chrysler though they have been sold twice. Bailing out the automakers is not without precedence! Republican President Nixon in effect bailed out Harley Davidson when he put a tarriff on foreign motorcycles that competed with Harley-Davidson. If not for that, The Motor Company would not be in existance and would be but another ghost of American industry.

The US automakers have some great electric powered cars near being ready for production. The government must see that they are helped along and see that the playing field for them is level.

It's another chicken and the egg situation. T.Boone Pickens is promoting CNG (compressed natural gas) powered transportation. Honda is currently the only company making a car running on natural gas. Natural gas is cheap, but a car can't carry much because it is not currently possible to store it in a liquid state. It can only be compressed. So to store enough gas to get around yet have some space for people and luggage, the range of the car isn't much over 200 miles before refueling is needed. The nice part is you can buy your own refueling station for your garage and connect it to your gas meter. The bad part is that it takes sixteen hours to refill and empty tank! Oh, it costs about $8,000 too. There are, however, commercial refueling stations that can refill your tank, actually it's recompressing it, and it doesn't take too much longer than putting $75 worth of gasoline into the the old Ford Explorer. The problem is, where are they?

They can be found at www.cngprices.com . You will see that WE Energies has a station over on West Avenue! It's mainly for thier use but they sell to the occasional consumer that wanders in. The biggest surprise is that the last price for it was $1.46 GGE. What's GGE? It's comparing apples and oranges. It stands for GAS GALLON EQUIVELANCY. So yes, you guessed right. Running your car on natural gas would be like paying $1.46 a gallon for gasoline.

Unfortunately, most CNG refueling stations have limited hours and are not in enough locations that a trip to the cabin in Up North Wisconsin can be done. So it is a chicken and the egg situation. Oil companies won't put in CNG pumps until cars line up for it. Nobody wants a CNG car if they can't get gas for it. What's the solution? I propose that the city, all cities for that matter, should step up and provide a refueling station open at reasonable hours and begin using CNG for government vehicles. If there is a market for the CNG fueled Honda, they will make more and I'm sure Wilde Honda will be happy to sell them. Other car makers will get into the act too. Soon Mega Oil will think about putting in a CNG facility at their local station and the ball will be rolling on it's own.

Lets provide the egg and the chickens will soon hatch!

 T. Boone Pickens has been spending his own money on TV commercials inviting people to visit his website and read his energy proposal for America. The man makes good sense and I signed up for his email updates.

One item I'm really fascinated with is some information regarding cars being fueled by natural gas. This is nothing new. Over twenty years ago we had a Ford van converted to run on propane. The gas station was by State Fair Park in West Allis and the oil in the engine never seemed to get dirty. Run out of gas before getting to a propane station? We carried a regular propane barbecue grill tank of gas that could be connected and get the truck another 30 miles or so. Even that wasn't really new technology. My uncle had a farm tractor, a Minneapolis Moline, that ran on propane.

On Boone's website is a link to natural gas fueling stations.  Those prices you see are called Gas Gallon Equivalent which means "CHEAP" as compared to gasoline. The Journal recently had an article on compressed natural gas and it was pointed out that there are home fuel pumps available to hook up to your gas meter. It takes a long time to refuel, but imagine never visiting a gas station again. Notice that a CNG station is here in town at the WE Energies site on West Avenue. The bad news is limited hours, probably due to their trucks being about the only ones using it, but I'm sure longer hours would happen if the public begins using it.

So while natural gas can be used to fuel our cars and trucks, what will the additional demand for it do to the price of it? Will it drive up the cost of heating our homes? There is still the so called "Carbon Footprint" that is left behind by burning natural gas, if you buy into that idea. I still believe that the solution to energy needs will be how we create electricity and the obsolescence of the internal combustion engine.

In the past I've criticized new construction as putting a load on our dwindling water resource. This, even though the business that I'm in is dependent on new construction. Briefly, I don't believe that long time residents of the city or county should be put in the same boat of inconvenience to accommodate development and expansion. Those dwindling the resource should be the ones to carry the load. Water wise, this would be prohibiting watering lawns, gardens and washing cars in new developments except with water gathered from cisterns or other non-aqufier sources. On site water recycling of gray water should be included with conservation efforts.

Preparation for the diminished used of petroleum should be implemented in the the building code too.  Electricity is the energy of the future. We will power anything with a petroleum engine with it and we will heat our homes with it. As an expert in the heating and cooling business, I can see gas furnaces going the way of oil furnaces in the next twenty years. Honda has shown a natural gas powered fuel cell generator to recharge electric cars and provide power for the home's electric furnace and heat pump/air conditioner. For those of you with hot water heat, there have been electric powered boilers so don't feel left out.

GM will be introducing the electric car, the Volt, which will run entirely on electricity, recharge at home if desired, but have gasoline back-up so you don't get stranded. In my needs, the electricity range is adequate for most all of my driving around. So the Volt can replace one of my cars and the other can be the guzzler used to pull the boat and so forth.

The building code should anticipate the plumbing changes and increased electrical service needs of the near future and require that it be install NOW in new construction and remodeling of existing homes and buildings. 

Today's front page was about an electric car call the ZENN which is all electric and plugs into an regular outlet to recharge. All well and good until I saw it had a top speed of 25 MPH. Uh, can we say golf cart here?

But it has ZERO EMISSIONS! False.  It is possibly dirtier than your Ford Explorer hoping to make it between gas stations before going empty. Don't get me wrong. Electricity is the future. The question unanswered here is how much pollution does the electric company turbines emit to create that electricity? We are an "Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind" people. As long as our toilets flush, we don't care too much about where it goes. As long as our electric car is pollution free here, we don't care about how much pollution is made to create that electricity there.  Oh, it has lead acid batteries. Did you know these spent batteries often are shipped to the Pacific Rim where recycling the lead fouls the land and poisons the underpaid workers there? To be fair, perhaps the same thing happens to the nickle batteries used in current hybrids. That I don't know.

Putting all of that aside, let's encounter one on the streets. It goes up to 25 MPH. What good it is for just going around the subdivision? Oh, you are going to try to get downtown with one? Lets see, Moreland is 30 MPH and 35 MPH in places. You can't drive five over the posted speed limit without someone blowing your doors off to the right because you aren't going fast enough to suit them. Then again, maybe a bunch of these things slowing down traffic might make things safer.

The article did say that some owners of the Zenn do have wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity. Bravo! That is true green, but also the exception.  So until we know how many kilowatts these things require to move about and how much the power company's pollution output is to generate that versus that of a somewhat comparable subcompact, lets not get too excited over humming along at 25 MPH.