Those were the days

The year is 1978. The Cold War rages on, artificial insulin has just been invented, the city of Cleveland goes bankrupt under the temperamental eye of then-mayor Dennis Kucinich, and the world sees both the tragic death of Keith Moon and the equally tragic birth of Ashton Kutcher. And, weirdly enough, Jack Nicholson was driving a hydrogen car. Probably while wearing flared pants and a shirt with lapels large enough to threaten commercial aviation, and his bit about the car “revolutionizing suicide” due to the lack of poisonous exhaust fumes was in poor taste, but this is still pretty amazing. Even moreso than those taffy-thick Canadian accents. Yikes.

Returning to 2009, Daniel Sperling appeared on The Daily Show recently to explain the government’s role in advancing fuel-efficient cars. Sperling didn’t have too many nice things to say about corn ethanol, claiming that it doesn’t do much for climate change and that the money would be better spent on electric cars, but the more interesting portion of this interview was his explanation of what has kept electric/hybrid/hydrogen cars from rocketing into the mainstream; the technology is well on its way, but the auto and fuel industries (and consumers of course) need to accept it, and the government is the mediator between those two forces. We hadn’t really thought about it that way, but that does make a lot of sense and, really, that smacks of Obama’s approach to the issue. In our next post, we’ll suggest ways for the government to sweet-talk Big Industry into accepting flex-fuel cars, but feel free to comment if you have ideas of your own.