The EV1 while a nice concept may never have made it to the market becuase as you state, People will only buy it if they need it, and trust me a few years back nobody had the burning desire to run out and buy one. And yet wow, GM was researching it on thier own? What caused them to do that? Maybe a FEDERAL GRANT and TAX Incentives?
California Air Resources Board evil people that they are, charged with actually enforcing FEDERAL Air Quality Standards (wow what a bunch of horible people, trying to make it so people can actually breath) may or may not have actually forced the EV1 out of the market, but if GM had wanted to bring it to market, they would have done so. Remember they are the omnipotent corporation that you seem hell bent to demonize so you cant have it both ways, they can't be the victim if they are the agressor too.
So to "punish the evil do gooders at CARB", poor little GM decides they won't bring the EV-1 to market? Sounds like an "I am taking the ball home and you cant play with it" attitude to me. More likely, it was not financially viable and they blaimed CARB to keep the shareholders off their back. Always easier to blame the government, they are too busy doing your bidding to defend themselves. What kind of responsible company would not bring a product to market out of vindictiveness? Surely there were other reasons.
Funny about the Power Utilities going bankrupt, Have not actually seen anybody go out of business, SMUD, PG&E and other power utilities serving CA still seem to be able to somehow turn a profit.... (in fact I believe for some a record profit). Now before you get all riled up, I am not saying the degregulation was anything but a ploy to Scam BILLIONS off of the consumers, and people responsible should be taken out and shot for it, but we know that ain't gonna happen... Most of the people truly to blame don't seem to be in reach of prosecution. (dont look at CA on that one, the FEDS once again have made that decision for us).
Your Idea that tax incentives are always a bad thing is a gross over simplification. Tax incentives are an excellent way to get a company to go in a direction that might be good for the people in general, but not financially feasable for a company in the short term. It is a financial arangement. And that is what government is supposed to do, help the people in general.
While you may not agree with where the money is spent in CA, and that too much is taken from business by over taxing and fees, Funding research in CA is a good idea because it can bring about change for the good of not just CA, but the nation and the world as a whole. This is an investment, a financial decision based on the good of the people instead of the bottom line of a ledger.
Your company moved to Ohio for a reason, a financial one. In your case it was to AVOID paying higher taxes and fees, but it still a decision based on financial motives. Companys staying in the higher cost of doing business area like California are providing jobs and supporting the comunities they are in, be it in manufacturing, transportation, housing and the list goes on.
If a company as big as GM can't AFFORD to kick out a single electric vehicle in CA, how are they or any other company going to be able to do the actual research and development to provide Fuel Cel vehicles which are a hundred times more complex to produce?
Your right that if someone needs something, many times someone will build it. But it usually is done far into the problem when things are desperate. And you know as well as I do something done in haste is usually done half assed and costs far more than if it is planed out and produced without the pressure of an "oh my god the world is gonna end" deadline. We have all seen examples of the never enough time to do it right but plenty of time to do it over scenarios. Stopgap measures are wastful and have little merit to explore.
The nation does not have the kind of time to wait around till someone decides to spend their vast personal fortune to bring a "car for the masses" to market that can transport us without polluting us out of existance. And I suspect whomever would do this "fairy tail funding" will still expect a significant return on thier investment, no matter how altruistic they seem. So once again we are at a position where money talks and chicken waste walks. Even the Gates Foundation spending billions to fight disease, expects to see progress or they will move money to more promising areas of "research". (ooops there is that dreaded word again).
Your quote of my "too much is given to big corporations" is out of context, (but then again you knew that because it fit your argument better). I said "too much is given for what they do to protect the envronment". My point was not that they should not be given incentives to operate cleaner, but instead that they should do more to operate cleaner for the money given. Companies will do what makes them money, not what is best for the envronment. You have only to look into the envronmental history of your new state to see plenty of examples of that. If it costs more to operate cleanly and there is no regulations telling them they have to do so, then the majority of companys will not. They answer to owners and shareholders who demand higher and higher profits and dividends, and you do not increase profits by spending money on things that do not increase productivity. Ok slight oversimplification but for the most part that is true in any business.
Your own posting and your companies actions prove the point. You moved your company to avoid higher taxes and more regulations that would cost your company more than you were willing to pay. You moved to a state with lower taxes, (may even have gotten a tax incentive to move to the state or a tax break for moving to a certain area) and are most probably in a significantly more favorable business climate due to relaxed envronmental laws and regulations. You went to where the money was better. To get companies to do things that cost them money, (such as develop ways to opperate cleaner)the evil onerous government hands out tax dollars so they can do so, and keep jobs and other tax revenue in the state and reduce the rampant unemployment that you railed against in your earlier post.
Sorry to get personal here but if your so concerned with unemployment in CA, what did moving your company to Ohio do to help that? What amount of pollutants are the trucks that haul your goods putting into the environment to haul your products to California. So your company is producing a product in another state, and selling it in CA? Are you collecting sales tax and sending it back to CA? No? If not then you are benifiting from California without putting anything back except your product, assuming of course your product has a positive influence to the economy and envronment, and does not get used up and thown into one of our land fills.
Since you want to talk about having your cake and eating it too, On the one hand you say that companies should fund their own research because tax incentives are bad, and on the other you say that GM killed the EV-1 because they could not afford to bring it to market under the onerous CARB, even though they had millions in tax incentives, loans and other funding that did not come out of GM's coffers. A more believeable scenario is that it was not a viable project at the time with curent technology, and GM was looking for an out, OR..... More likely still, Big Oil sat down with them and said, gee, electric vehicles are not gonna make us money, we find that annoying. Let's find a way to kill this project and blame it on someone beside you and me. If you do so... we will keep oil prices lower than they should be for the next few years to help boost sales of combustion based vehicles. We will both win, and make CA government look like the bad guys for trying to clean up the air.
If the current belief by the public is that big oil is behind our invading Iraq, then surely they could have had the clout to kill a tiny little research project and keep thier hands clean while doing it.
As for the pig and chicken waste power plant, I am very happy to see research like this out there and as I stated before, "it is a great thing" but it's not done without costs. If it truly was developed without tax incentives, or tax breaks, government sponsored loans or any form of government assistance or funding, GREAT! But I bet as part of the "evil empire of researchers" they have had at least one if not both hands in the public grants, loans, subsidies and such. Maybe not but probably. But thinking about it, if they haven't, then they are not doing as much as they should for the project because the money is out there. And if they are not using it for good projects like this, some hair brain is gonna piss it away on something stupid and then you will have a REAL waste of tax money. If it was produced entirely with private funding of a financally well to do backer, Where do you think a good deal of his wealth came from? TAX BREAKS is a likely bet. If he owns a coporation with share holders and he did not take advantage of tax breaks and low interest loans, and outright grants availble to help his company, then the shareholders should be in his face demanding an explanation why.
Having said that, I see you studiously avoided discussing any byproducts of the process of producing power from waste. How much Methane does a huge pile of cow dung put out while it is waiting for it's collection, or for that matter while it is being transported over roads that are paid for by tax money? How much water polution is produced by the chicken and cattle waste as it is hit with the rains and snow melt? Where does all that polution go? These are serious concerns to the envronment, and need to be looked at in the total scheme of things. Dairy pollution and Poultry is not a small problem. The reasons that many companies that do poultry processing reside outside CA is because it puts them beyond the tougher safety, hygine and envronmental requirements that CA has in place. (and before you say it... many of those laws are unenforced due to lack of manpower, and yes political pressure, but like it or not, stuff like that happens everwhere).
Yes turning these wastes to energy is a good thing, and should be aplauded, but at the same time, understand that as I have said in this and other posts, there is no free lunch here. Every form of energy production has a downside. We have to decide what consequences of energy production are acceptable, and in what quantities, and try and balance those with the positives of the power produced. If the polution is just shifted from air polution to water polution what have we gained?
Andy, it is obvious that you are never going to be a big supporter of California, and that is fine. CA is never going to return to the way it once was, Orange Groves for miles in any direction and Weber grills in every backyard, (Man if we knew how much hydrocarbons we were throwing out with all that charcoal lighter back then). Clean air to breath was taken for granted when I was growing up in LA, (tells you how long I have been around), but nowdays it is a luxury, and people celebrate days when they can see the San Gabriel mountains from the beach. Of course those days really suck for the people in the inland empire and the High Deserts because all of LA's polution gets blown in thier faces.
California air quality has deteriorated, but at a FAR slower rate than it should have, considering they are adding WAY over a million people to the population a year from points south of the border. And Andy, trust me on this, they are not buying EV1's Prius's or Honda Civics, they are dragging crap out of the scrap heap and beating it till it runs and driving it till they get caught. The only reason people can even walk around in the LA Basin without an Air Pac is because of the work of CARB, and the South Coast Air Management District and others who work to bring clean breathable air to it's citizens, and the Californians who agree that clean air is important, and live under the laws and regulations designed to help make that a reality.
As you and I know (but others reading this may not), LA is a big bowl with high mountains around most of it, and Strong onshore breezes keeping the smog and particulates from disapating off into the ocean. If CA had not gotten tough on air quality, trust me, people would be unable to live in the basin, it would be that bad. Lung problems and cancer would skyrocket and people would be dying in droves.
People have to take responsibilty for their actions, and even the action of existing on the earth leaves an imprint. Clean Air, Clean Water should be something everybody should be able to have. Doing something to help bring this about IS A GOOD THING. Even if is pisses off GM, puts a scientist out of work who gets to write a book about it and make money that way instead. If the death of the EV-1 and skyrocketing gas prices have done anything positive at all, it has caused people to rethink their priorities with respect to transportation and the envronment. As others have posted the EV-1 had significant drawbacks from a standpoint of economics, getting power to the car from the power producer was not efficent, I think I heard three watts of power to get one watt to your house. Now if you had a house with Solar Arays on the roof the Cost per mile delivery would be almost nothing, but cost of array, Cost of storage batteries, envronmental cost of recycling of said batteries and worn out solar Arrays, envronmental polutants released in a house fire with one of these installed..... there are tradeoffs everywhere you look, but the one thing we agree on is we have to do something... and soon.
As always, I await your reply....