The short of it
Elizabeth Kolbert, in a few elegant words, gets down to crux of the world’s car consumption problems, and makes a strong point for why alternative fuel technologies will ultimately fail to save us:
Designing the car of the future is such a daunting challenge because it’s bigger even than cars. […] It’s true that hydrogen cars, which the Bush Administration and the Big Three claim to be working on, don’t need gasoline…but they do need hydrogen, which has to be produced using energy from somewhere. If that energy comes from, say, burning coal, […] then the puzzle hasn’t been solved; it’s just been rearranged. The same catch applies to plug-in cars and cars that run on ethanol. (Ethanol made from corn takes almost as much energy to produce as it yields.) If someone, somewhere, comes up with a source of power that is safe, inexpensive, and for all intents and purposes inexhaustible, then we, the Chinese, the Indians, and everyone else on the planet can keep on truckin’. Barring that, the car of the future may turn out to be no car at all.
