Our Impending Doom

Well if you haven't seen Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, you should.
The fact is that our cars, yours and mine, belch out carbon dioxide in their exhausts. Well, really they spew a host of gasses, carbon monoxide for example, but if you have watched Mr. Gore's film you will understand why carbon dioxide is the important one. Turns out that ever since the industrial revolution, we've been releasing carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels.
So, this gas traps energy from the sun by reflecting it back down after it has bounced of the planets surface. Global warming. The glaciers have been receding, the polar ice is melting. As it melts we will lose the advantage of the sun radiation reflecting icecaps, compounding the problem. This is real, the internet says so: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7843186.stm

So, red alert, take evasive action, buy one of these newfangled cars.
Chevrolet is working furiously on the Volt, slated for the 2010 model year. It is an electric car, which has a gasoline generator to recharge its batteries. This is different from your mothers Prius or Lexus hybrid, because those use the gas engine to drive the wheels. This doesn't.
Its a huge step, so give Detroit a little golf clap.
Lets see what our friends across the Pacific have been up to while domestic auto has been busy developing the science that allows a car as advanced as the Volt.
Hm, well according to Honda, they started leasing a car in California called the FCX clarity: http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/
The name hearkens back to the CRX coupes Honda brought us in the very latest 80's and early 90's, but this car is not just a high mpg lightweight commuter car, its a hydrogen powered car. Its byproducts are heat and water.
Is anybody still clapping for Detroit?
Its too easy to point fingers at the Big Three and "player hate." Lets point a finger at the people who came up with this whole Ethanol idea. Basically, we decided that we should ween off our dependence on foreign oil by blending in an alcohol we derive from our corn crop. Everybody at GM gave each other high fives as they put "Flexfuel" badges on all their giant SUVs to announce to the world that they can run on E85. To put it bluntly: Whoop dee god damn doo.
Did no one think about the fact that by processing sugar cane, you can yield more ethanol with less crop? There's a reason Brazil exports so much of it. No, like upright citizens of the US we went ahead and made ours out of corn.
Newsflash: Corn is food.
Oh, also, people are starving.
Does anybody find it objectionable that we are using excess food to run our giant unncessary vehicles? You know, the ones using practically ancient suspension technology, the ones where all the interior bits don't fit together quite right.
From the last I had read, Nascar cars still use leaded fuel. This has to do with the stress the valves are under, and the lead helps to keep them from shattering, or something like that.
You might say that the whole sport is completely backwards.
But then you'd be offending alot of people, the masses who stand around all day drinking fine American lagers while huffing leaded exhaust fumes for five hundred laps, waiting for a crash.
People, if we want to keep from wiping ourselves off the planet, we've got to do better than this.
Does anybody remember such a thing as durable goods? Things made so they could be repaired rather than replaced? Sometimes in this modern society, you can't help but feel like you're completely surrounded by cheap crap. Out there somewhere is a pile 100 feet deep of broken cheap crap and the plastic packaging we bought it in.

Its enough to make you crazy.