Maybe we can hope that change with a capital “C” really is beginning. Perhaps the greening of America is at last more than political rhetoric. Let’s believe that not only is our new president in favor of using more natural gas, but that Congress can also really work with him to get some important initiatives in place that will create more immediate uses for our country’s huge natural gas supply.
President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel of Illinois has been one of Congress’s biggest proponents of compressed natural gas cars. Last summer he introduced legislation that would mandate US automakers to build 10 percent of their fleet with natural gas fueled vehicles by 2018. His bill also included tax credits and other incentives to spread natural gas pumps to filling stations across the country.
The bill has gone nowhere yet, but maybe that’s about to change.
Despite whatever may occur in the future that we can take issue with, it’s quite admirable that a former Illinois Congressman would be a proponent of natural gas as opposed to powering cars with corn. Illinois is in fact one of the top two corn growing states in America.
But life is always full of surprises and this is a good one. Using biofuels may be better than burning foreign oil, but using corn as a biofuel while people starve throughout the world, seems shortsighted. Why should we be turning corn or any other food into fuel for cars now that we have such an abundant of natural gas discoveries. Unlike corn and other food source biofuels, natural gas has only one real purpose and that is power.
More gas vehicles and greater availability of natural gas is a good thing, but supply and demand has always been the key to change in situations such as this. So let’s write our representatives, senators and our new president. Let’s get some demand going in the US to mandate more implementation of natural gas.