There’s still the question of whether you’d really want to do it. But at least now there’s a chance if you do. Buy an Air Car, I mean, India’s fragile-looking, compressed-air vehicular miracle. The chance, by 2009-2010, to finally thumb your nose at the oil ticks and begin to stop financing terrorism. But read the whole story, found here. It could be it’s just too early, but it’s confusing to me.
Via Instapundit
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Wait…what’s compressing the air? I have no problem with the idea, but you’ve still got to compress the air. Short of nuclear, the oil ticks do a pretty good job of that. The best we know of, in fact.
I wouldn’t call the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal combustion compressing the air, exactly. As for the Air Car, well, that’s one of the wrinkles. It’s got a built-in air compressor. But it takes four hours of electricity to “refuel” it. Or you’d need to find a gas station with a custom air compressor unit to “refuel.”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4217016.html?series=19
So whoever buys one of these cars obviously is due for a culture change. I don’t think you’d want to take a long trip in one, certainly not if you’re in a hurry. They also don’t look particularly crash-worthy, especially in a sudden meeting with an Expedition.
So it has to be plugged in for four hours to refuel the air tank. That electricity is generated somewhere, most likely with dead dinosaurs of some form.
They don’t mention the power draw, so there’s no way to know the efficiency compared to gasoline. But I bet it’s a lot less than most people think.
I guess it’s slightly cleaner than your average golf cart with batteries, so that’s nice. I’d buy one for zipping around town running errands, but not at $12K.
It would be a great errand-runner, and multipled by every city in the country, that might be enough to make a significant change in the disposable (i.e., terror-supporting) income of the oil ticks. I’d rather worry about impacting them than global whosis or some other environmental doodah. But, either way, you have to start somewhere.
If you have a nuclear power station on one end and an air car/electric car on the other, I would say that you got the pollution and the oil ticks covered.
There is a huge (Israel-size huge) electric car project in the making with Reno/Nissan and a few investors. No answer to the power station side, unfortunately. And Israeli power stations being mostly coal ones are kinda stinky.
Thirty years ago I thought nuke plants were a stupid technology because of the long-lasting, deadly waste. But, nothing better having come along since, I am now a believer in their superiority.