Tomas Martin

My U.S. Infrastructure and Employment Plan

Good article but natural gas-powered cars is a mistake, in my opinion. The US reserves of natural gas would be exhausted quickly if large numbers of cars started tapping into it, and the investment needed to upgrade gas stations would be huge. There's a similar investment needed to build infrastructure for electric cars but the difference is that electricity is not dependent on a resource that could run out. If you want to use natural gas, great. Build some gas-fired power stations (or even better, some concentrated solar thermal-gas hybrid plants in the desert) and use that generated electricity to charge up car batteries. That way you can use the car batteries as energy storage for a smarter grid, too.

Natural gas, like hydrogen, is a blind alley for transportation. Neither solves the problems we have with oil. Convert to natural gas and in fifteen years we'll have to convert again. Convert to hydrogen and all you're doing is generating electricity and then wasting some of it making hydrogen. Pickens is only promoting the natural gas angle so much because he owns a load of companies in that sector, as Californian voters thankfully saw when they voted down props 7 and 10.

Electric cars are the future and all these stopgap measures do is keep the current oil infrastructure happy. It's a short term measure that will give us the same problems further down the road. Investing in electric trains and cars will be a far better longterm use of the cash.

The rest of it, I strongly agree with.