Op Ed

Op Ed

Big Business and Inventions

When you were growing up, didn’t you think by 2011 we’d live like the Jetsons? Didn’t you think we’d be beyond worrying about trivial things like what fuels our cars and homes? Of course not! But in 2011, we still worry deeply about what fuels our cars. Why? Even though we don’t have basic things like flying cars; we have things like microscopic computer processors. We have the technology to solve this problem, so where are the 1000mpg cars? Oh, they’re here but they’re not welcome. 

Though we have the technology for 1000+ mpg cars, they have yet to be seen on the public market. Maybe it’s just because no major car companies have produced them. That makes sense, I guess. But now Ford Motors has created a 300mpg electric/hydrogen hybrid and I don’t know about you but I haven’t seen any on the roads. The car is standard size and can go up to 85mph. It runs on a lithium battery until it depletes to 40%, once it hits this point it switches to a hydrogen powered fuel cell and with this change goes from 25mpg to 280mpg. Pretty neat, huh? But I still don’t see any. That’s probably because oil companies have made it just about impossible for any car that runs over 60mpg to be commercially produced. 

In the past, people have claimed to have invented cars that run 1000mpg, cars that run on water, and just about everything else. Most of these claims can obviously be seen as propaganda but a few claims do seem plausible. There is one claim of a water-powered car(it’s more like a dune-buggy but for the sake of the argument) by Stan Meyer. It achieved an amazing 100mpg but never became popular due to Meyer’s somewhat suspicious brain aneurysm at 57 years old. There are many theories that say oil companies ordered him assassinated, though that is unlikely, the fact is he created a water-powered vehicle that worked. That means we have the technology and it isn’t being used. 

The list goes on and on about other people who have invented things like 2000mpg cars and simple, emission-less, energy that have supposedly been killed by big time energy companies. These claims are probably propaganda but that doesn’t change the fact that even if the inventors death wasn’t the fault of the companies, they certainly benefitted from it. If these people hadn’t died or been put into jail, the companies would be in jeopardy of losing billions upon billions of dollars and in the past, companies like this have shown that they will do anything for another dollar and will go very far to do it. 

So whether these inventions are publicly available is due the the inventors misfortunes or companies preventing them from getting there or not, the truth is the technology to make them exists. This technology is available and we’re going to need it if we actually want to affect global warming and keep this planet able to sustain life.