How-to: Green Enough to Save the World

          Green Enough to Save the World

This car runs entirely on air and can go 120 miles on a tank at 70 miles per hour.

If the compressor runs on electricity that is solar or wind power generated it is

as green as it can get.  A totally green car. View the link in the story to 

see the car in action.

     Sometimes I get frustrated when I have an idea and people tell me, “it can’t be done.”  When someone says that to me they have just destroyed any credibility they may have had.  If everyone had that view of things we would still be living in Europe and the world would be a completely different place than it is today.  Whether that would be good or bad is a hard question to answer.

     Would I be able to even write this had that attitude prevailed?  Certainly Ireland would be a different country without the potato that was bought from South America.  A world without potatoes is almost as unthinkable as a world without cars. The discovery of oil may have saved the whales from extinction, but it might lead to the end of mankind if an alternative is not found.  That alternative is what lead me to write this article to start with. 

    It is a coincidence of history that the automobile was invented at about the same time as the discovery of oil and gasoline.  Gasoline was actually a waste product when the first wells were developed.  Oil was the ingredient that was needed to replace a diminishing supply of whale oil for lamps and industry.  While that may have been a lucky coincidence, it is time for the world to grow up and wean ourselves from our gas and oil addiction.

     There are a lot of green and renewable alternatives to oil.  It was in the course of trying to create a green and renewable powered compressor that I found out that "can’t" is part of the vocabulary in American business today.  I called a company in California wanting an air compressor that I could run on solar and wind generated electrical sources.  The salesman told me it can't be done.  It seemed that the energy needed to start the motor would take more energy than those two sources of energy could produce.

 

     Well after a little thinking and searching I remembered that many trucking companies use compressed air starters to start the diesel engines on semi-tractors. Once running the diesel engine generates enough air to refill the tanks.  At the end of the trucks use cycle the remaining air is stored in the tanks till it is needed again.  Then it is tapped to start the cycle over.  Now I just need to find me an expert that is more close at hand and can actually help me build my compressor.

      So why do I need the compressor so bad.  Well the reason is that I want to build a totally green and renewable energy powered vehicle.  The vehicle already exists and can be seen in a short eight minute video on You Tube by clicking the link I have provided. The problem for me is that I do not want a compressor that runs off of the energy grid.  Doing that would be like having an electric car.  An electric car is not a green vehicle.  It is simply using fossil fuel via an extremely long tailpipe called an electric line.

       If you build a compressor that runs on electricity generated by wind and solar powered sources you will have a truly green machine.  Of course building this system would require the world to wake up and admit there is a better way of doing things.

      Americans have a habit of reinventing the wheel, if you followed the link I provided earlier you will quickly understand why this second video is totally irrelevant.  It does show how far behind we are in this area of technology.  Having lived all over the world in the military in the sixties and seventies I realize many of the things we pride ourselves on were available in Europe long before they came here.  I could buy gas in Europe after midnight with the station closed long before the technology came to America.  They also had on demand water heaters way back then.  Yet one foot was still in the stone age, as the apartment I rented in Germany required me to build a fire to heat the water for my apartment.  While it was a pain to do, it beat cold showers. If things don't change cold showers are going to be the standard, not an option