Aren’t you getting frustrated seeing gas prices up almost daily and not a sensible word to address this from Washington, the presidential candidates, our elected officials or the press.

I recently saw the 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” What an eye opener! There are solutions but they would cut into the profits of oil and car companies who so far, have been able to keep a lid on this by talking “green” and stonewalling – that is, promoting solutions that would take decades to implement (hydrogen fuel cell for example) to draw attention away from a solution that would work today, the electric car.

A car company demonstrated in 1996 that an electric car, the EV1, could cruise silently at 80 mph, accelerate to 60 mph in seconds, produce no exhaust, use relatively simple and less expensive motors and be really fun to drive. You simply plugged it into an electric outlet overnight to recharge the batteries and the next morning it was ready to go with the equivalent of a full tank of gas. The only required maintenance was periodic rotation of the tires and replenishing the windshield wiper fluid – according to the documentary.

What a threat to the car and oil companies’ huge investment in the costly, emission spewing internal combustion engine! So the car company removed the threat by collecting every EV1 and crushing or disabling it. Not a single functioning EV1 remains today in public hands. So you are forced to buy and drive what is essentially obsolete, air-polluting technology and pay outrageous prices at the pump.

The public needs to get informed and talk about this. A good starting point is viewing “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which can be purchased from amazon.com for less than $10 including shipping. I have put my current thoughts together at http://www.comped.org/oilcrisis/.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but it’s a starting point for discussion.

Get informed. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to me at hans@comped.org. Let our representatives hear our voices, not just those of the oil and car lobbyists.