Posted by
Scatbug on Saturday, June 14, 2008 2:21:02 PM
Has the solution to eternal environmental bliss, including non-modulating ocean levels, pleasant temperatures and great skiing, at last been found? Many who care about such things believe it indeed has:
TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.
Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water -- rain, river or sea -- was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).
"The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time," Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.
"It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars," he added.
And for those skeptics out there, here's the video proof:
Nifty stuff, huh? But before you burst into a chorus of "Glory be to Gaia!", I'm afraid there is a dark side to this story. It seems we are currently in the midst of a worldwide water crisis:
By Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor / May 29, 2008
Public fountains are dry in Barcelona, Spain, a city so parched there’s a €9,000 ($13,000) fine if you’re caught watering your flowers. A tanker ship docked there this month carrying 5 million gallons of precious fresh water – and officials are scrambling to line up more such shipments to slake public thirst.
Barcelona is not alone. Cyprus will ferry water from Greece this summer. Australian cities are buying water from that nation’s farmers and building desalination plants. Thirsty China plans to divert Himalayan water. And 18 million southern Californians are bracing for their first water-rationing in years.
Water, Dow Chemical Chairman Andrew Liveris told the World Economic Forum in February, “is the oil of this century.” Developed nations have taken cheap, abundant fresh water largely for granted. Now global population growth, pollution, and climate change are shaping a new view of water as “blue gold.”
Water’s hot-commodity status has snared the attention of big equipment suppliers like General Electric as well as big private water companies that buy or manage municipal supplies – notably France-based Suez and Aqua America, the largest US-based private water company.
Global water markets, including drinking water distribution, management, waste treatment, and agriculture are a nearly $500 billion market and growing fast, says a 2007 global investment report.
But governments pushing to privatize costly to maintain public water systems are colliding with a global “water is a human right” movement. Because water is essential for human life, its distribution is best left to more publicly accountable government authorities to distribute at prices the poorest can afford, those water warriors say.
“We’re at a transition point where fundamental decisions need to be made by societies about how this basic human need – water – is going to be provided,” says Christopher Kilian, clean-water program director for the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation. “The profit motive and basic human need [for water] are just inherently in conflict.”
So add automobiles to the water consuming mix, and we now face the prospect of profiteering on such an obscene scale that ExxonMobile will look like a lemonade stand. And then of course there are the unimaginable environmental horrors: dry lakes and rivers, deserts where farm fields once stood, an alarming drop in ocean levels, reformulated Coca-Cola products, and on, and on, and on.
Heaven help us.