The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 576
The article suggested a plan whereby the U.S. would become free from foreign
oil in a rather short period of time. I didn’t fantasize about the flipping of a switch
at midnight and then expect a complete and total change by dawn the next
morning. It called for a gradual, but aggressive switch to alternative fuels. It also
didn’t call for the prohibition of all domestic oil production – unlike the 18th
Amendment to the Constitution, which stopped all legal distillation of alcohol.
My plan understood the need to keep existing domestic oil and gasoline jobs
fully functioning, the need for petroleum-based fuels for older vehicles, as well
as for the myriad other products that require petroleum-based chemicals. I reviewed and commented on the various possibilities, from compressed air to algae to propane and CNG to ethanol.
I’m telling you this because I understood then, and I understand now, that technologies change and improve and evolve: it happened with powered flight, with
the telephone, with television, with refrigerators. If there had been in 2008 a
national imperative to make an alternative fuel our primary fuel – and if Barack
Obama had been serious when he gave his August 4th Energy Policy speech,
I have no doubt that the technology used today, just 5 short years later would
have shown considerable improvement over the technology that was used in
2008 to produce whichever of the alternatives was selected.
Let me illustrate this point further: In 1994, when TheAutoChannel.com was just
in its infancy, we knew then that the new media called Internet would one day
converge with television. That was our vision, and in an effort to make that vision a reality we sought out technological solutions. One day I visited a teleconferencing exposition in Anaheim, California. I approached one particular video
teleconference vendor and told him what we had in mind, and asked if his service could be used by us. The vendor became angry and he began yelling at
me. People in the surrounding exhibit booths stopped what they were doing and
turned their attention to the commotion. The vendor shouted, “What are you
stupid, it will never be possible to send video over the Internet; the fastest that
data will ever travel over twisted-pair copper wires is 28k.” (This was in the days
when 9600 baud modems were considered high-tech and only a relative handful of geeks had 14.4k connectivity.)
In response, I said to the irate exhibitor, “The fact that you are saying right now
that there will never be a way to transmit video over the Internet means that
there are people in garages and basements at this very moment figuring out
ways to make transmission faster and to compress the data smaller.”
