When I saw Al Gore and Barack Obama sharing a stage in Michigan tonight, I couldn’t help but think back to the 2000 presidential election. Back in 1992, Senator Al Gore had published a Book called Earth in the Balance in which (p. 325) he wrote:
It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a 25-year period.
What Al Gore was talking about was not getting rid of cars. What Al Gore was talking about was changing the way that cars were made, building smarter cars that didn’t rely on internal combustion but incorporated electrical systems of generation.
In the 2000 election, Republicans used that quote to screech that Al Gore wanted to ban cars. They laughed at him in the face and proclaimed that in a Republican America, the internal combustion engine would be here to stay. George W. Bush praised the internal combustion engine in a Michigan campaign speech, declaring:
Unlike Al Gore, I don’t consider the internal combustion engine a threat to the future of mankind. I consider it a remarkable testimony to American ingenuity.
Bush hadn’t even read Al Gore’s book before he criticized it. Michigan automakers ignored Gore and followed the plodding path of preserving the internal combustion engine unaltered, making SUVs, SUVs, and more big gas-guzzling SUVs. Michigan automakers have lost their leadership of the world auto market to foreign producers that sell hybrids like hotcakes. The internal combustion engine is already on its way out, and because the U.S. would not get out in front on this issue, it has been left behind.
Barack Obama has gone right to Detroit to reiterate Al Gore’s point and call for U.S. automakers to embrace technological changes that will reap both environmental and economic stability. Tonight, Obama shared the stage with Al Gore and took Gore’s message one step further. With so much of the capacity of U.S. automakers left unused now, Obama proposed harnessing their production power to meet the next generation’s energy needs, taking “those old steel factories in Michigan to start making windmills.”
It’s been eight years since Al Gore was laughed at just for writing about environmental conversion, and we’ve lost a lot of ground. Barack Obama is issuing the call again, and nobody is laughing this time.
Just a small historical detail, hardly worth mentioning. The internal combustion engine was NOT a product of merican ingenuity or engineering.
This statement is just another example of our intellectualy challemged President who is in fact living proof that “you can’t fix stupid”.
Your right….it was only made affect and practical by Americans…..