Springtime

With the return of Spring, it's time to get back on the bikes. Not only does Kathleen commute, but I like it to get around and to exercise when I'm off work.

One of the things we like to do is to ride over to the Saturday morning Farmer's Market. Somewhere, I remember reading that McKibben's Deep Economy contains a statistic to the effect that 10 times more conversations are struck up in local markets like this than at Wal-Mart. I believe it - I usually don't bother asking Wally World employees for help because they generally are about as familiar with their own stock as I am. But the employees at both the local co-op usually know where to find stuff. Sure enough, the FM didn't disappoint.

The animal shelter was out with a pack of dogs. I met an old friend who was working with them; she said they had adopted out 7 dogs that day. I would have guessed 7 per week was about normal.

Then we came across a bluegrass band (The Salty Dogs). Many dogs sitting around, beckoning the wife to pet them. I struck up a conversation with Matt, who was riding a modified bicycle he used for "bike tramping". It was modified with an Xtracycle, which I thought would be something useful for grocery shopping. Matt had some, um, unorthodox views of the world, including a belief (that we did not explore) that the current economic downturn was intentionally arranged; that fluoride (which he described as an "iron oxide" class of chemical) was used to dumb down the population, a trick we picked up from the Nazis; that Kissinger was a criminal; that Godzilla-derived foods from Monsanto were poisoning us and causing diabetes; that those foods and water in plastic bottles were causing cancer; that this nation has a scary hive mentality; and some kind of anti-immigrant thing. As we parted, I realized that it's probably a good thing I keep my mouth shut since I probably come across the same way to the average person.

After that, my wife stumbled upon someone selling sewn goods [1] right across from someone with a ... is that? Yes, it's a Nolan Chart with dozens of little stick-on stars on it. No doubt as to who these people are. They were just packing up the booth (we got there late), so I stopped to confirm my suspicions. They saw me eyeing the chart, asked if I wanted to take the World's Smallest Political Quiz, I pointed to the top corner and told them I could save them some time if they would just put my star "here". They wanted to know if I wanted to join and I made a crack about being president of the Anarchy Club. "Oh, no, we're not anarchists, but someone called us ... what was that? Minimists?" I suggested, "Minarchists?" "Yeah, that was it." Er, several years ago, the Chair, the lonely, lonely Chair, asked if I would like to be Vice Chair of the county LP. I turned him down. Even then, I thought there was something vaguely wrong, and now I know (thanks to Kevin Carson) that the thing that bothered me most (still does) was the vulgarity of the LP. Anti-tax, anti-regulation, but not necessarily anti-large corporation. As if Wal-Mart sized organizations sprung up shortly after the foundations of the Ziggurat of Ur were laid.

Next up: someone advertising an Earth Day bicycle ride.

Then a woman selling some really interesting red chile sauce mix (note to MR readers: "chili" is a greasy concoction of beans and hamburger meat favored in Texas, "chile" is a red or green fruit noted for its spicy hotness and used in Mexican cuisine). Very good, less than half the price of the canned stuff we were using for enchiladas (its a very particular, locally canned sauce that we like), and much spicier.

Then, two people who were sitting in for the abuelita who sells fresh local herbs and spices (she may be a curandera?). Turns out she is the mother of one. Her meticulously packed plastic bags are hand-labeled, sometimes with very interesting descriptions and misspellings.

Then, our favorite vendor. We usually get a few sticks of incense from her for the shop. Today, she has a new dog that she just adopted (Buddy).

Then, we look at the interesting homemade breads, grains, nuts, and other stuff sold by a family who practices their own faith that seems to be an eclectic mix of Mennonism and Seventh Day Adventism. Good snack cakes, we got there too late to get any. On to the Asian artist who sells really, really decadent deserts, coffee cakes, etc.

Yeah, this is a lot more fun than Wally World or the Sons of Albert.

[UPDATE: Oh yeah, now I remember what Matt's anti-immigrant thing was: actually, it wasn't anti-immigrant so much as it was pro North American Union. He had implied that there was no real enforcement of immigration laws because, as we all know, the USA and the dollar are going to be gone in the next couple of years. Lest it be thought that I am tring to make him out to be a crackpot, let me say that he seems like a really nice guy and someone you'd probably want around in a Mad Max scenario.]

------------------------
[1] I learned from her that Albertson's is offering a $0.05 discount if you bring your own bags. I bought reusable bags from the Albertson's in Albuquerque. I take them into Wal-Mart with me. Gradually, I hope to get their checkers trained to hand stuff to me so I can load my own bag.

A Bold Conjecture

I have the germ of an idea that I need to present in three parts today, with an example in the near future. The three parts are An Interpretation, a Reinterpretation, and The Question Begged.

If we look at political economic history, we find that the state, especially the national government of the US, has evolved from a very simple set of rules (the Constitution was a few pages) to a very complex set of interlocking and sometimes contradictory rules, interpretations, agencies, and so on (the CFR is several volumes, best measured in linear inches rather than pages). The growth is due to the fact that at every stage, the rules created conditions for new problems which have to be addressed by new rules. For example, the rules which allowed transnational railroads to prosper led to the industrialization described by Chandler (energy + transportation => scale economy), creating the conditions for labor exploitation and unrest, followed by a new round of rules to constrain the industrialists and protect the workers, creating ... and so on. The explanation provided by the defenders of state intervention is that each of these changes has been largely beneficial, and that the few negative consequences may easily be managed by a new round of regulations that are also largely beneficial. They lay claim to pragmatism and empiricism, setting those in opposition to dogmatism or ideology, noting that they simply want to use the best means for achieving the best ends. We are all better off, so those policies were beneficial.

We could reinterpret this by working backwards. Today, we are better off than a generation ago, and a generation ago was better off than the previous generation, and so on. Thus, in order to get the improvements that we need today, it was good that they enacted those policies a few years ago. In order to get to the preconditions for today's prosperity, the need for previous policy choices are obvious. Thus, we should be grateful for those policies and for the idea of state intervention in general. For example, we need the current transportation system, so it was good that the state built roads. And to get the cars that ply those roads, we needed the railroads, so it was good that national regulations to govern railroads were put in place.

But this begs a question: What do they mean by "need"? In one sense, their argument is circular: in order to have the existing set of social, economic, and political mechanisms that we need to perpetuate the existing system, we had to have made those choices in the past. But why do we need the existing system? Indeed, why did the people in the 19th century need the railroad choices? "Need" means that a person or society can not continue to exist without those things. If anything, the fact that society had existed and evolved for thousand of years to that point without those institutions or policies is proof that those things were not needed in any meaningful sense of the word.

When the word "need" is used or implied, red flags should be raised. Who needs (or needed) it? Why? And is (was) the proposed policy the only way to achieve the need? And what, exactly, is needed? Remember this the next time you encounter one of the world's Polanyist, William Jamesist, pragmatic empiricists, who suddenly seem to have shed their pragmatism in favor of some Platonic ideal toward which their programs are working. Did society "need" the specific policies that were involved in the creation of transnational railroads? The railroad owners would appear to have needed them more than society at large; people wanting to farm profitably further west, further from water routes, markets, and hungry customers needed them; politicians wanting to influence the type of farmer in order to influence the type of state (pro- or anti-slavery) needed them; people wanting to enlarge the market for their manufactured goods and thereby increase profits (McCormick, for example) needed them; but those groups do not come close to comprising a majority of the citizens of the country. And if they had not gotten those policies -- laws regarding incorporation, bankruptcy, interstate regulation, subsidization and land transfers -- they still would have had other options, most of which would simply have been more expensive in the short run, but perhaps less so in the long run. For example, prior to the massive build-out of railroads, private roads and canals were all the rage. Fogel, in his response to Rostow, even noted that a horseless carriage existed in 1830 and that "not only the fundamental internal combustion engine theory, but even that of the diesel engine was published as early as 1824," citing D. C. Field's "Mechanical Road Vehicles" and Orville Charles Cramer's "Internal Combustion Engine" in A History of Technology (Charles Singer, ed., 1958) and Encyclopedia Britannica, (1961), respectively (see also Samuel Morey). As these predated the discovery of oil, they would have led to the creation of a more local, environmentally friendly, efficient (in the sense of having fewer externalities) transportation system and if a national system had evolved, it would have been more organic, i.e. the economies of scale would have driven the system rather than the system driving the economies of scale.

Bold enough?

Road conditions

A recent article on NPR stated that it would take $2 billion over the next decade to repair roads in Maine and "[t]he congressionally appointed National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission estimates that the cost of needed repairs is $220 billion -- at a minimum -- per year" to repair all of the nation's roads. This is seen as a crisis that requires federal subsidization and massive increases in federal and state funding. They are therefore starting to look at increasing gasoline taxes.

The last substantial increase in federal gasoline taxes took place in 1993. Given that we "only" used about 142 billion gallons of gasoline in 2006 (and similarly for 2007; high prices have caused a stagnation of fuel consumption), that means the federal government "only" collected about $26 billion. Given that the aggregate state collection is similar (state fuel taxes vary considerably, but average right around $0.18 as I recall), then "only" about $50 billion or so of the $220 billion is being collected. Your fuel taxes therefore need to climb from a combination of around $0.36 per gallon to something more in the neighborhood of $1.62, an increase of $1.26 per gallon.

May I suggest something else? What about supporting tolls? Though perhaps not very practical for intracity driving, they are eminently practical for freeway and bridge traffic. But first, there is a substantial obstacle to overcome: the belief, widely held in the US, that driving cars is a right and that roads should always be free. Clearly, we understand that roads and bridges are not really free, but the costs are hidden rather than explicit [1]. Tolls are a way of making those costs explicit.

As an exercise in noting how bad the anti-toll and especially anti-private infrastructure bias is, I will cite the Forbes article cited recently in the comments at MR as an example. The Ambassador Bridge is a privately built, privately owned bridge from Canada to the US near Detroit. It is the most popular bridge in the Great Lakes region: 3.3 million cross on the Ambassador vs. 3.6 million on the other four bridges combined. On 9/11, local government officials closed off the nearby car tunnel, and traffic subsequently backed up on the Ambassador. Truck wait times went to 12 hours because of the lack of border Patrol and Customs inspectors.

The tone of the article is as follows: Because some private person had the foresight to build a bridge at that location 75 years ago, and because it is the most popular truck crossing today, and because the state has not built a competing bridge nearby, somehow the owner is a bad guy. And because 9/11 brought about panic and security precautions that caused backups, the owner is a bad guy. And most of all, because he doubled toll rates for trucks and quadrupled them for cars in the past 25 years, he is a bad guy. Bottom line: private infrastructure is bad [2].

The point about toll raises is misleading. If there are four hour weight times at rush hour, this is a sure signal that the tolls are not high enough; perhaps they should consider higher tolls during the rush hour, the same way commuter trains do. If cars are Teh Bad because of pollution and AGW, then tolls should be higher everywhere, not just at the bridge (that's essentially what a carbon tax is). Here's the Environmental Defense Fund on the subject. Furthermore, bridge and road tolls have increased nearly everywhere in the past few years, not just on this private bridge. The tolls on the publicly operated San Francisco Bay Bridge were $1 in 1988, but are currently $4. That's a quadrupling in twenty years, quicker than the cited period of 25 years for the Ambassador. And London has famously begun charging congestion tolls to enter the gridlocked inner zones.

I think we can all agree that we rely on the transportation infrastructure and that we would like for it to be properly maintained. That is essentially a public good (not a pure public good, though). Every unavoidable pot-hole creates potential additional maintenance for the car owner. We would also like to see traffic reduced to the point that we don't experience delays and frustration. But fuel taxes are just one of several responses. Tolls that are reinvested in the roads are a better way of both directing the money to the most used infrastructure and directing the traffic to the best infrastructure. For example, if you had to raise tolls on a freeway to keep up the maintenance due to heavy truck usage to the point that shippers began shifting more of their traffic to more efficient railroads, that would be a good thing, no?

Oh, you did remember that railroads in the US are (for the most part) privately operated and maintained, didn't you?


-----------------------------------
[1] Note the parallel to education: we all know that school buildings, teachers, and books cost money, but the phrase "free education" is used without irony. May I also suggest a small, means-tested toll at public schools? You can call it whatever you want -- "tuition" or "user fee" -- so long as you collect it.

[2] Don't tell the people who believe that private infrastructure is impossible. They prefer the impossibility theorem to the malevolence theorem, but will fall back to the latter when it suits them.

Wal-Mart and sustainability

UPDATE: In response to some thoughtful criticism I got from a container shipping industry executive, I edited a portion below. I had said that the state helped break transport unions, but in reality they are still a force in the industry. It would be more accurate that the state forced them to accept change.

I got interested in some of the responses on this post on Environmental Economics. If Wal-Mart had claimed altruistic motives for some of their policies, that would properly be called "greenwashing". However, they weren't. Tim Haab was basically pointing out a truism: Wal-Mart's interest in sustainable measures (including hawking CFLs, incorporating passive solar for lighting and active solar for electricity, and so on) is done for selfish reasons: to make money. Like any post involving Wal-Mart and sustainability, it became a lightning rod for people with definite policy agendas. Given that I am likely to either defend or attack Wal-Mart and sustainability, depending on the context, I have an opinion but no definite laundry list of policies I'd like to see enacted.

You could summarize the many variables and value judgements in truth table format with about 27 variations (3^3) and assign each to an ideology. The variables are Wal-Mart, sustainability, and planning/government, each of which people may label as good, bad, or benign/irrelevant. Wal-Mart good, sustainability irrelevant, government bad is the default position for the vulgar libertarian. Wal-Mart bad, sustainability good, planning good is the default position for the Progressive. W-M bad, sustainability irrelevant, gov't good is the default for the populist/conservative. W-M good, sustainability bad, gov't benign is the evangelical right (she drives an SUV and has 6 kids).

I think my entry in the table would be "Wal-Mart benign, sustainability good, planning/government bad". Wal-Mart doesn't "drive" the system the way both the Progressives and the vulgar libertarians say that it does. Rather, the system created Wal-Mart. Going by Chandler's Visible Hand, people responded 100 years ago to the first department stores (Marshall Field's) and then to the mail-order stores (Sears, Woolworth's) the same way they do to Wal-Mart today: by claiming they would eat away at local businesses. Well, if it wasn't Wal-Mart, it would be someone else.

So I tried to point this out and emphasize the fact that it is state capitalism that creates the unsustainability, of which Wal-Mart is just a delivery boy. Our system looks like a giant vacuum cleaner that hoovers up resources in the developing world and kicks them out back here; Wal-Mart is the least fancy exhaust portal. We the people continue to support policies which produce "efficient" systems for delivering products to us. Those systems are a combination of transportation, energy, and credit subsystems that interact with cultural values to both create the demand and impose costs on the use of alternatives.

For example, we have national energy policies that ensure the profitability of large electrical monopolies who generate from coal and natural gas. This will be defended as efficient because it is highly engineered to look that way from the standpoint of the producer and the consumer. However, from other standpoints, there are externalities that are not accounted for. Those externalities include both the pollution and the intangibles, including the isomorphism around the chosen system. This is still something I'm working out, but the isomorphism includes high voltage AC-based transmission and distribution (which increases the cost of using alternatives, like LEDs, or introducing alternative sources, like solar[1]), an emphasis on greater supply (rather than demand-based solutions such as increased insulation or more efficient motors), centralization (rather than distributed generation), and isolation (rather than integral with the users so that the externalities fall on them). When the design was established 100 years ago, AC was a brilliant improvement over DC, regulated monopolies were promoted as the only viable alternative for generating and distributing AC power, and the accumulated engineering successes within that political framework have been impressive. But nothing is so impressive as the socio-political engineering, including a nearly invincible cloaking device and a strong superstructure made of an alloy of the Edison Institute, politicians, populist regulation cheerleaders, discount rate receiving electricity-based industries (like electrical steel furnaces), coal miners unions, dividend receiving widows and pension funds, and soccer moms worried by the so-called de-regulation that is nothing of the kind. Given a different political framework, the counterfactual engineering successes would be just as impressive, but the overall social efficiency (including the external costs) could be much better.

We furthermore have policies that promote and protect the use of petroleum, including "free" taxpayer-supported road systems and the Carter Doctrine. We have policies that promote and subsidize long distance shipping of goods, including eminent domain and taxpayer support of railroads (mostly as a historical fact, not current policy, though the pension plans still receive special tax recognition and grade crossings are your problem, not the railroads') and container ships. The container shipping history is more recent and includes several very interesting factors. Not only did the state (including the federal government) help break [force] the longshore unions who opposed [to accept] the shift to container ships, but the cities, states, and federal government paid for the infrastructure, including the highway systems, harbor improvements, and dock facilities (cranes, rails, etc.). Today, taxpayers foot the operational costs, including infrastructure maintenance (harbors and roads) and cargo inspections (thanks to our interventionist foreign policies, the great transportation system that brings goods from the world is also a potential Trojan Horse for WMDs), but the investments are promoted as tax-yielding investments rather than the revenue consuming corporate welfare programs that they are.

All of this infrastructure, what W. W. Rostow would call social overhead capital, was put in place in the 60s and 70s, long before Wal-Mart became a force. And yet, having taken advantage of it, Wal-Mart is seen by some as the bad guy. Those who hold that view are mostly self-designated Progressives, the same people who favor central planning for efficient management of the economy. This is the main reason why the two groups -- those who see the infrastructure as the pinnacle of efficient engineering, Wal-Mart as benign, and sustainability as irrelevant, and those who see globalization as the evidence of Western greed, Wal-Mart as the embodiment of evil, and sustainability as the new religion -- talk past each other. One looks only at the engineering and sees none of the underlying political structure that brought it about (and perhaps even opposes any government interference with this "free market" system), and the other refuses to admit that their policy preferences are simply the most recent incarnation of the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place. They want another patch on the binding on the dressing on the bandage on the abrasion caused by the crutches they promoted for a fit patient in the first place.

And to top it all off, we have the same social engineers looking to solve the sustainability problem by imposing unsustainable, modern, Western values onto the undeveloped countries whose citizens are the victims of this system. For them, the real problem in the world is not Western-style consumerism, it's those other people who breed like flies because they're ignorant and poor. This obviously plays into biases some have against swarthy "others", but does not necessarily spring from those motives. And it seems to have escaped the attention of the planners that such lifestyles, having been practiced for millennia, are inherently sustainable.

But no, we're going to retrain them rather than us. First, as the story goes, we have to promote growth. In a recent post, Dani Rodrik says,

"What kind of a growth strategy should this [developing] country follow? A strategy that focuses on expanding employment opportunities in the rural areas where most of the poor live? Should it consist of expanding their capabilities, by investing directly in education and health? Or should it focus on wherever the economic activities that will provide sustainable sources of income growth into the future lie, even if these may be in mostly urban areas and likely to foster greater inequality in the short-run?"

He concludes the latter. But he isn't the first: Rostow explicitly proposed that strategy in his Stages of Growth: increase the efficiency of farming to free up and feed a substantial labor pool that can move to urban areas and work in heavy industry. You can do this by subsidizing cash crops (for export) instead of traditional crops (for consumption) and by providing social overhead capital (transportation). Diana Davis' history of the French colonization of Algeria in Resurrecting the Granary of Rome shows that they accomplished the former by several means: confiscate public lands used by nomadic herders, outlaw traditional farming methods (like using fire to clear scrub), and ban the payment of taxes with in-kind payment (force a switch to a cash economy). People who suddenly couldn't sustain themselves by traditional means and now needed to raise money to pay taxes migrated to the cities to look for jobs with French employers. Note how the preferred policies of modern social engineers are remarkably similar to the policies of colonial powers in an unenlightened age.

After claiming that "The joint stock company owes its existance [sic] to [increasing returns], not so much to state (or other) promotion," in response to which I pointed out the above, one of the commenters on the Env-Econ post, Reason, listed his favored set of policies to reduce population growth:

1. Increasing the duration of education which increases the costs of having children
2. Providing social security which reduces the benefits of having children
3. Better public health so that people can be confident their children will survive
4. Peace (same reason as above)

Having selected government policies to solve a problem, he found no opportunities for anarchism to solve the same, as if he had actually searched for any. I'm not going to defend outright anarchy in a world unused to anything but increasingly active states where force is the first resort, but I should think it obvious that smaller states are generally not pugnacious, so he was wrong about his fourth point not being addressed by anarchism. [2] More importantly, though, he failed to explain how 1, 2, and 3 were going to be funded in a pre-takeoff, sustainable society of the type found in the undeveloped world.

Such societies are marked by their traditional, subsistence farming practices, and their children are a necessary source of labor and the primary retirement pension for their parents. Trade is frequently made by in-kind payment. For example, Diana Davis notes the achaba property arrangement in which herders exchanged their labor for pasture rights in Algeria. In order to introduce education and social security systems to take away the parents' labor and pension incentives, there must first be a system of taxation and management. These emphasize the state rather than the community as a central cultural institution and establish the state as central collection and dispensation authority in addition to, or perhaps in place of, its role as night watchman. More importantly, however, it forces the people to abandon traditional methods of trade and agriculture and to switch to crops and methods or other uses of their labor which are easily traded for cash. That means that they must switch to crops or labor of value to people who have cash, i.e. the developed world. The cash crops must have an export value, or the labor must be in an export industry.

Now, just where do they think The Gap, Nike, and Wal-Mart get their labor, sweatshop or otherwise? This is exactly the point made by Ellenita Muetze Hellmer (about which I wrote here).

Given that the greatest advances in public health are typically made by applications of civil engineering rather than medical science, Reason's third point is the step which usually gets the state involved first in sewage projects, then in national transportation infrastructure (roads, rails, ports), and then in "other" engineering projects (oil field development, power facilities, civil defense, air bases, nuclear fuel processing). I know that's a very unconvincing linkage, but I predict that you could draw these direct lines if you only knew enough of the underlying history. After all, if you have the spontaneous creation of private engineering capability and a weak or decentralized state, those engineers won't go looking to develop a military capability because the politicians and bureaus won't exist or have the means to pay for it. Compare the early US -- where military facilities like Ft. McHenry were still conceived as defensive structures; the design and construction were ad hoc, Golden Carrot-type contracts (award a prize to the best designer); and community-based (the federal government granted money to local communities and provided the construction design) -- to modern US military-industrial arrangements where contractors conceptualize, design, build, and endlessly refine offensive weapons while the spin-offs are touted as beneficial to the public (the internet from DARPA, Tang from NASA, etc.). Or consider the military pedigree of modern quality control theory.

When people in the developing world are employed by consumer-oriented industries, what values are transmitted? The employees at Nike factories in Viet Nam first bought bicycles (sustainable) and then motorbikes and now look forward to moving up the consumer ladder to a car. In China, cars (especially with "foreigner" plates) are a highly desired commodity and the sustainable bicycle culture is all but dead. The developing world, with encouragement from the social engineers in the developed world, is building a sketchy replica of the type of economic system whose money they wish to attract. They believe they can attract that money by feeding the West's insatiable maw with container ships full of cargo. I called this (tongue-in-cheek) a Cargo Cult (which seemed to offend odograph, though I don't understand why). Unlike the actual Cargo Cults, it may succeed in attracting the money. For some people, for a while. However, it is not the road to sustainability and it is unlikely that 9 billion people will succeed in enjoying the lifestyle currently enjoyed in the West. The problem lies with us and our chosen means, not them and theirs. The solution lies with change in our society, not with them choosing our existing means.[3]

--------------------------------


[1] Yeah, I know: where would the LEDs and solar cells come from absent the system that provided the R&D resources to discover them? This is perhaps not as strong of a counterargument as you might think: Einstein theorized the photoelectric effect long before the R&D resources were available, and perhaps more would have gone into searching for practical applications it if the political support for large, central, coal-fired generation had not been as successful. No legal monopoly means higher cost and more awareness of the externalities because nobody could afford to build large, centralized systems. That in turn means more searching for alternatives. Also, it would be more feasible today to install a small solar or wind system (like many farmers had before the REA) because you would only be replacing or plugging into a decentralized subsystem.

[2] It is at least arguable that an unstable anarchy is potentially very violent - even David Friedman admits as much in noting that Saga Iceland collapsed in a series of blood feuds, albeit after 300 years of stability. But a stable anarchy can't raise the money or army to go looking for a fight.

[3] Yes, I'm also concerned about population issues. But I think that a less important problem compared to that of Western consumerism. I also think it foolish to believe that a proper list of policies and a certain amount of money is going to solve the former, or a sudden majority of libertarian politicians the latter. Solutions to both problems require wholesale changes in cultural attitudes and values; politics and economics only take you so far. Sometimes the state can lead cultural change, but not always. And not always for the better. Saying self-evident things like, "education of women is important to control population growth" doesn't mean much in Islamic or other traditionalist societies where women are relegated to second class status. I doubt you could fund or force anything which would work. Creating change in those climates requires something that operates on a more personal level than a United Nations program, something that flies under the states' radars, something that cannot be denounced by Imams.

White Zombie

I'm still chuckling while writing this.

From the WSJ ($? "Those Muscle Cars Really Are Electric", John Fialka, 1 August 2007), Portlander John Wayland took a '72 Datsun 1200, shoved a couple of forklift motors and 30-some batteries in it, and is now the fastest street legal drag racer in the country. It completes a quarter mile at 109 mph in 11.9 seconds, dusting all kinds of muscle gassers.

Yes, the batteries are a little dangerous (the WSJ explains how he got the PlasmaBoy nickname) and the electricity probably comes from a coal-fired or natural gas fueled plant. As I claimed in this article about biodiesel dragsters and this one about solar-n-hydrogen powered stretch Hummer limos, these may be totally impractical, but they demonstrate the potential, push the envelope, and turn skeptics into believers.

Here's Wayland's EV dragster homepage, PlasmaBoyRacing.