Retooling America to End Oil Addiction

Care of the lovely folks at Gristmill, I’m excerpting today from a piece by Jack Hidary of SmartTransportation.org about what’s needed to address the oil crisis and our economic woes in Detroit. Read the entire post at Gristmill:

To decrease the use of oil in our cars we need the
kind of retooling we did for World War II. In 1941 we
asked Detroit to refit all their factories from pumping
out cars to manufacturing planes and tanks.

Now we are in another war. A war against this
debilitating addiction. We must ask Detroit and all
automakers in America, foreign and domestic, to
retool immediately to make cars of more than 30
mpg, hybrids of 40+ mpg and the mass scaling of
plug-in hybrids that connect to our electric grid.

We must give the automakers the means to do this.
Automakers are in trouble and cannot retool on their
own. We should offer them loan guarantees and
give incentives to private capital to invest in an
immediate restructuring of all car plants.

…Our national energy labs have concluded that we
could replace more than half of all cars in the U.S.
with plug-in hybrids and not have to add even one
power plant. There is plenty of spare capacity at
night.
We should give the utilities the ability to make the
same profit off of efficiency gains as generating
electrons and give them the capital to upgrade our
to a smart network. This will create millions of high
and low-tech jobs as we move to a 21st century bit-
enabled electricity grid.

... let's leverage private capital to build out
public transport. While replacing cars is critical, we
must move more Americans around using shared
systems. High gas prices have already pushed
public ridership to new highs. Let us meet this
demand by putting at least $100 billion of public and
private money into this infrastructure.

…We need to get U.S. workers back on the job and
retool our economy now for this new reality. We are
up to this challenge, but we must act now.