We recycle bottles; why not energy? How? HYBRIDS!
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Anita Dufalla/Post-Gazette
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The Wall Street Journal on May 29 trumpeted Shell's $4.7 billion purchase of the Warrendale-based East Resources -- "one of the biggest players in the exploration of the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation" -- in a "transaction that underscores the frenzied global interest in North American shale gas resources."
Meanwhile, we are watching daily as the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico.
Environmentalists warned us about the risks of offshore drilling, but we thought we knew better. Environmentalists warn us now of serious problems to come with shale gas extraction.
Is there an alternative to the seemingly endless cycle of drill, spill and burn?
Yes -- simply by recycling energy.
How? Hybrid vehicles.
Hybrids recycle energy. They represent the future of American transportation and are the key to making significant reductions in our consumption of fossil fuel and our production of greenhouse gases.
Consider that we have built a worldwide infrastructure to recycle bottles, cans, newspapers, cars, concrete, computers -- almost anything you can name. But has there ever been a worldwide shortage of newspaper? Or soda bottles? Have we ever gone to war over newsprint? Have we ever invaded another country to protect our access to bottles?
Recycling bottles, newspapers and old Toyotas is important, but energy is central to the very existence of our civilization, yet we make no effort to recycle it.
This must change, and it is what hybrid vehicles are designed to do.
Engineers invented hybrids to allow for the recycling of energy, not because some law of physics says electric motors get better mileage -- they don't. They simply allow the kinetic energy of motion to be recaptured and stored for future reuse. No other drive system does this.
Basic physics tells us that energy is required to get a vehicle moving. In conventional vehicles, that energy comes from petroleum, which is converted into kinetic energy by a combustion engine. To stop, though, our vehicles dump this kinetic energy as heat generated by the brakes -- an extravagantly wasteful process that repeats itself over and over, day in, day out.
First Published June 6, 2010 12:00 am
