Rachel Rye Butler
National Conservation Organizer
Sierra Club, Green Transportation
e: [email protected]
w: sierraclub.org/transportation
RE: Invitation to participate in your Transportation Activists Blog
Dear Rachel,
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your Transportation Activists Blog. Working together we can move this nation into more environmentally friendly solutions while still supporting our economy and way of life.
From the Sierra Club, Green Transportation Invitation:
Why are individuals’ stories important? Personal stories help illustrate the fact that transportation is more than just statistics- people are affected by our current system that keeps us addicted to oil while providing too few safe, convenient transportation choices.
By sharing our stories through social media, blogs, and in print, we can focus public attention on the need for a better transportation system.
So how will this work? Throughout the next few months, we’ll collect compelling stories from individual activists on how they are affected by our transportation system and why they care about making it better. After we’ve collected a good set of personal stories, we’ll work to share these stories through blog posts, social media, and our local newspapers.
I’ve exchanged emails with many Transportation Activists on why they care about transportation, and I’ve heard some very compelling stories from this group. So let’s get those stories out there!
Steve Frazer Submission - 2011-06-06
For more than 20 years, I was employed by Fortune 100 Corporations and government agencies as an Analyst. I enjoyed the level of influence my job provided me to “make a difference” in those organizations. Then about 10 years ago, I began to see the world in a very different way. I realized my training and experience had exposed me to data and information that gave me uncommon perspectives on a list of issues … energy, our economy, our environment, …
For the past 100 years we have lived in a petroleum economy - we still do today though now at a more humble level. While this cheap energy has been the enabler for the global economy and arguably the source of Tom Brokaw’s, “The Greatest Generation” (the first generation in human history to wield such cheap and plentiful energy), now our world’s petroleum reserves are running out. So I took a position working as a Researcher in the Engineering College of a major university for 3 years then started a renewable energy company with the hope of “making a difference”, but not for a corporation’s bottom line.
For the past 5 years my partners and I have been developing relationships with universities, National Labs, DoE, DoD, USDA, EPA, NRC, USGS, Sierra Club, car manufacturers, mining companies, … We set up the tools of a Fortune 100 Corporation in the form of fast, high capacity computer servers, web crawlers, databases as our infrastructure to be able to collect and process massive amounts of information from all sources.
We needed to find a solution that …
- would get the U.S. off of OPEC petroleum rapidly - in less than 5 years.
- is environmentally friendly - one that resulted in a radical reduction in emissions.
- reduces petroleum usage without seriously impacting our nation’s economy and our way of life.
- is scalable based on our available resources.
- is economically viable - today - affordable for the masses with no government subsidies required.
… and that solution must be sustainable.
When we started our firm we were focused on EV technologies. As we delved deeper into EV’s and plug-in hybrid manufacturing, life-cycle processes and their needed resources, we came to realize that while there are small viable markets for these vehicles, they simply are not a large scale solution - not today or in 20 years. Consider that there are nearly 300 million vehicles in the U.S. today and nearly 2 billion vehicles in the world.
We have compiled and digested the data on the various technologies and now have an immediate solution and the path beyond. Not surprisingly, it is the same solution that most of the rest of the industrialized world adopted and began migrating to over a decade ago.
As you are reading this memo, U.S. drivers are already migrating to this solution en masse at the highest rate in history. The faster people adopt this solution, the better off we are as a nation as it promotes a stronger economy, 30% lower emissions, reduces demand for petroleum and it establishes the needed infrastructure for the next logical step in our transportation future.
Spread the word - tell Detroit by your next vehicle purchase to stop manufacturing gasoline powered vehicles - click this link for more information.
Sincerely,
Steve Frazer, CEO
Emerging Technology Corporation
Green Division
http://etcgreen.com
Boulder City, NV 89005