I attended the Hawaii County Democratic Convention last month. Until he arrived himself at about 11:00 I was distributing fliers for my choice for congress from our district, Bob Marx. He is a Hilo attorney of 30 years who has represented a lot of public interest matters. The "grandson of plantation workers" on Oahu, he graduated from Law School in Portland then served tree terms in the Oregon State Legislature before returning to Hawaii to set up practice in Hilo.
I worked pre-convention on the resolutions committee and spoke on two resolutions. One that I wrote was poorly received and I'm afraid it illustrates how little people understand or are willing to take ownership for environmental destruction. It was to give polluting bio-mass burners no state or county support and to encourage geothermal and other clean renewables instead. People are desperate for jobs that the average person can aspire to and that will reduce our dependence on oil imports that they are willing to overlook the pollution of bio-mass burning. About 1/3 of the attendees oppose geothermal because either they believe Pele will be offended, and we are not talking about natives in particular, or because the only currently operating geothermal facility has had a few leaks and not enough buffer zone around it. I think very few people have any understanding of how much energy they waste and they are not willing to give up commuting in their monster trucks that undoubtedly produce in aggregate 1,000's of times the pollution that a few geothermal leaks let out. Regarding surplus geothermal power going to free cars of gasoline, they've never seen it so they don't believe it. They have seen successful use of solar here and don't see why we can't just put a solar panel on the car's roof because they refuse to learn about the amount of energy required to move their monster truck or SUV.
There are a few early adopters on this island driving electric cars now, Leafs, Mitshubishi "i cars", and one Tesla, and sometime next week we will receive the Th!nk City that my wife Myrna test drove on a family reunion trip to Chicago. Yes a long way to ship a car but as none of the electric brands are carried by a dealer here we would have needed to ship from Oahu at least. This car was a European brand that has had a long history of struggle and ownership changes. Our's was assembled in Elkhart , Indiana then the company went through another of its bankruptcy/re-organizations resulting in closure of the Elkhart plant. About 100 cars remain to be sold at discounted prices and they have longer range than the Leaf or the i (100 miles city, 85 miles highway). They have light weight, large battery, no-rust recycled ABS plastic body panels and will require about twice the electricity as our whole house uses per commute day. And yes, we do have enough room left on the roof for that many more solar panels --- when we can afford them. Follow the link to the web site for Th!nk.
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