Why not Natural Gas?

Today I heard, for the first time, about cars running on natural gas. This seemed like a great idea. Natural gases are abundant, cheaper than fossil fuels, and they burn much cleaner. They are also a lot safer because the ignition temperature is about twice as high as fossil fuels. Why don't we use fossil fuels to power our cars?

After doing some research I found a couple of pages that gave me some interesting answers. This Wiki Answers page has some theories but I still think that natural gas is a viable way forward. One of the reasons was that the infrastructure for natural gas isn't in place. We don't have the filling stations to meet the demand. Also it costs around $2,000 to convert a car to run on natural gas. It seems to me both of these problems can be solved. Eventually we will run out of fossil fuels and will be forced to find an alternate fuel source. Why not start the conversion process now so that we can slowly make the change to natural gas instead of being forced to hurriedly make the conversion sometime in the future?

It seems to me that the thing that is standing in the way of natural gas right now is lobbying from the petroleum companies. They are incredibly wealthy and powerful so they can stifle any attempts to find an alternate fuel source. In my mind though, the smart play for them would be to embrace the switch early so they can be the leaders going into the future. Fossil fuels will run out so you might as well get ahead of the game. Already a lot of industrial vehicles such as forklifts run on propane. Also Honda has a natural gas powered Civic. The only problem is that there are only 800 natural gas filling stations in the U.S.

Sportsmanship= Humanity?

Last Wednesday we talked about competition and winning. We discussed sportsmanship compared to, "If you're not cheating then you're not trying!" Why do people in the midst of a battle, whether it be a sport or a real battle, show sportsmanship when at the same time they are trying to beat the other team?

From my experience playing soccer, sportsmanship has always been displayed on the field. If team A has the ball and someone from team B gets injured, team A will kick the ball out of bounds to the the injured player get off the field to receive treatment. When play resumes, team B will give the ball back to team A. This is not a written rule but one that is universally practiced because even though the teams are trying to beat each other, they want to do it in a fair way.

This idea has been present all throughout humanity. During World War I on Christmas day, German soldiers, who were fighting the British and French, put decorated Christmas Trees in front of their trenches. This led to a truce for the night. German, British, and French soldiers started singing carols together, exchanged gifts, and even started playing a game of soccer. This shows us that even in the trenches, one of the most inhumane environments, the soldiers still possessed the will to hang on the a little bit of humanity.

More evidence of this is found in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch." In this book, Solzhenitsyn writes about the terrible conditions in the Russian Gulag. The prisoners are in a constant battle with one another for survival. This survival of the fittest mentality would lead one to think that the prisoners would be turned into animals with no regards for human decencies, the opposite is true however. Solzhenitsyn writes that the only way for the prisoners to survive is to work together to maintain a degree of humanness. It is the ones that lose this degree of humanness that are the ones to die first. When eating dinner, the prisoners to not immediately devour their food and pick scraps off the ground, but instead take their time. This display of human behavior is what allows the prisoners to survive the Gulag.

We as people need a certain amount of discipline and order to maintain what makes us human. You see examples of this all around our communities and it is what makes us humans. It separates us from "animals" and it is what has allowed our species to thrive and grow.