I had a dream about 5 months ago in which people were putting trash covered with ants into their cars to make them run. It was seriously exactly like that scene at the end of Back to the Future. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” The very next day Whitney was telling me about a friend of hers who uses vegetable oil to run cars. I had never heard about this before, but I’m getting more and more interested.
Just found this site: www.vegenergy.com… they offer biodiesel classes in Atlanta and will convert your car to accept vegetable oil. Now if only I lived in Atlanta!
In the same dream, I was looking at all these power sources, and watched as a pair of hands reeled up power lines into a tight coil and then handed them to me. On the reel it said, “the history of power”. As I read this history, I realized that the ‘alternative resource’ community was about to come into maturity.
The oil companies in America are getting grippy. The three biggest reported at least 68% percent increases in their third quarter, making them among the highest quarterly profits ever made by any company. Obviously a large part of this was their profiting off of the hurricane scares and perceived potential oil shortages. We can expect more of this to come, and I am not one of those who thinks the oil companies are a part of a grand conspiracy, but I do think that as these discrepancies make it into the public consciousness there will be greater demand for alternatives.
At least in this country, the environmental movement and sustainable research is still considered in the mainstream as fringe thinking. Part of this is because the DNA of the movement is still imbued with a bit of worst-case-scenario idealism. As a result, I think things have developed a lot slower than they could have, and not just because big corporate money is clouding the picture. We are going to be given fresh inventors with fresh hope. As well, some of the best thinking has come from outside America, especially in places that are outside of the “roman grid” so to speak, both naturally and spiritually. Norway for example, will probably be the most advanced nation in terms of sustainable resources, simply because it has not had the historical dependency on mainland technology. It is still largely agrarian, with a lot of land and a lot of room to grow into.
However, we just can’t avoid the changes that are going to come. Austin, where I live, has the most comprehensive green energy program in the u.s. that includes both solar and wind powering options. I pay about 10 extra dollars a month for the city to buy and sustain windmills in west texas. This basically gives back into the power grid and provides more energy for others. For about $15,000 you can outfit your property with solar energy, and the city puts you on a 15 year rebate plan which almost entirely pays off the costs of installation. That’s the cost of a new car, and then the city pays off your car for you. And then you basically get free energy. Needless to say, I’m plotting how we can do this!
