Corporate America and the Migration to Clean Energy
Want a good, quick read? Check out (FedEx Chairman) Fred Smith’s testimony to the Senate Fiance Committee — and note in particular Joseph Lado’s comment under it. In my estimation, this is precisely on target, and exactly the type and level of indignation that rhetoric like Smith’s needs to provoke.
As Lado points out, there is nothing wrong with forming a group like The Electrification Coalition — but we need to note that it was formed last year. FedEx has been tinkering at the edges of this problem for years, generating fantastic publicity (famously driving a single van across historic Route 66), while making very little real progress — over a period of a couple of decades — in terms of changing out its fleet in favor of EVs.
In his letter to Fred Smith, Lado asks:
The reality is that the United States has had an oil dependency problem creating strategic, economic and pollution problems for nearly 4 decades now. When are you going to stop playing at green and make the real plunge? Please. Make a commitment, even better yet make a pledge to not purchase another petrol powered vehicles to replace retired fleet vehicles. Purchase instead, good, reliable, working and tested electric vehicles, to replace them.
It’s great to see stuff like this. The problem, of course, is that Fred Smith’s testimony has received many thousand times the volume of coverage than Joseph Lado’s insightful response.
Wally Rippel says that he’s sorry to note that a great deal of the evangelical world actively works against environmental friendliness. They seem to see fossil fuels as their allies, and ecologically sound solutions as their enemies.
Wally Rippel pointed out to me that there have been numerous casualties from the political and economic fall-out surrounding cold fusion. As an example, Dr. Peter Hagelstein at MIT, best known for his X-ray laser, is also a strong proponent of cold fusion. He’s been isolated from the entire scientific community because of that belief.
Wally Rippel pointed out to me that the human side of the equation is even more interesting than the science. There has been a calculated effort to discredit the idea of cold fusion. For obvious reasons, cold fusion threatens existing energy-related interests, and those interests have been intensely aggressive with throwing people off the trail.
Wally Rippel believes that it was simply an intellectual error to assume that fusion could only happen in the way it was does in the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, i.e., 100+ million degrees Kelvin and extremely short time periods (10^-22 seconds).
Wally Rippel described to me how cold fusion is a concept that began in 1989 with the experiments of Fleischmann and Pons at the University of Utah.
![](http://i708.photobucket.com/albums/ww83/craigshields/Deuterium_oxide_Norsk.jpg "Wally Rippel - "Cold Fusion is Legitimate Science"")
Is cold fusion legitimate science, or a hoax? Wally Rippel believes the former. When we electrolyze heavy water, i.e., water made of deuterium and oxygen, in the presence of a palladium electrode, we wind up with more energy that we would expect – certainly more than we could explain with standard chemistry – and we get products that suggest that a nuclear reaction took place.
I hope to see a great number of friends and colleagues at this year’s Plug-In Show in San Jose, CA, July 26 – 29. So many things are happening in the development of battery EVs and plug-in hybrids that I look forward to this show every year; for my money, it really is the definitive conference on the subject.
I friend of mine noticed that the concept of “Tough Realities” (as in the title of my report: 
