My Personal Side
By Craig Hastings
I want to give you my take on the Green New Deal. For those of you with the ability to ignore and not read or watch the national news cycles recently, I applaud you. You will live a much more serene and less stressful existence than me by paying less attention to the cataclysmic events being predicted by some of our elected Congressmen and Congresswomen in Washington, D.C. Specifically, I’m referring to the freshman representative from the state of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Congresswoman AOC has recently touted her vision of America’s role in controlling climate change.
The craziness of her proposal shows just how little she understands how we live our lives in Central Illinois and about 90 percent of the rest of the country. This young lady must be living a life much different than yours and mine and maybe has never ventured outside a big city to understand how America really works. When her first news conferences aired I understood very well what her intentions were and so did most people who punish themselves as I do by watching anything news related coming out of Washington, D.C. Ms Ocasio-Cortez has since walked back on some of her more extreme 10-year energy goals mapped out in her Green New Deal.
Did this woman not talk to anyone before taking the world stage and proclaiming that she has a plan to eliminate fossil fuels over the next 10 years!? Well this isn’t a plan for anything more than how to get admitted into a hospital that cares for the mentally ill! No fossil based fuels means no gasoline or diesel powered vehicles and machines of any kind. It would mean a switch to solar electric and battery stored electric powered cars, trains, boats, planes, motorcycles, ATVs, etc.! How is that even possible we all ask ourselves? Free money! Yep free everything to everyone who needs a helping hand. But this cuts deeper than money for people like me. I own a few cars not to drive but because I consider them art, mobile art. An art form that requires gasoline to move them. Take away their ability to move under their own power, and you take away a large part of what makes them collectable art to me.
This idea is so crazy and messed up. Does Ms Ocasio-Cortez think that motor vehicles self destruct and turn to dust after ten years? Has she ever owned a motor vehicle? Does she understand there are people that have paid $500,000 and up for the vehicles they are driving now and one day intend to trade, sell, or buy another of similar value? What happens to the hundreds of millions of fossil fuel powered vehicles on the roads today? Maybe her Green New Deal has a provision by where the government buys all of our cars and trucks at the current fair market value when the ten years are up? Of course fair market value would be nothing if we are unable to buy gasoline, right? However, what about me and all the other motorheads out there like me that don’t want to get rid of our art?
My art would only require about 30 gallons of gasoline a year. But, Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s plan eliminates all fossil fuel production and use. Even if I smuggled a few barrels across the Mexican border I still wouldn’t be allowed to even start my cars. Getting gas across the border should be easy enough though, because Ms Ocasio-Cortez has supported efforts of most Democrats to stop President Trump’s border wall to keep drugs, sex traffickers, murderers, gang members, terrorists, and everything else illegal out of America. I presume Ms Ocasio-Cortez has studied the intelligence reports from Homeland Security and determined in her own mind that none of the above border concerns will have much of a health impact on the citizens of America. Just the exhaust fumes from our cars, I guess.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez, here’s a health concern that will happen in America in ten years if your Green New Deal happens and my friends and I can’t buy gasoline ever again for our rides. There will be an uprising that will surpass even that of gun owners when you try to take their guns away. Car owners, collectors, investors, builders, all will unite and fight you and any government official that might dare side with you on the elimination of fossil fuels. Ms Ocasio-Cortez you may be young enough to see the day of very limited fossil fuel powered vehicles traveling up and down our highways, I won’t. Automobile manufacturers will first need to be forced into gradually eliminating production of combustion motors in favor of electric motors. Twenty years after this happens you might be able to start capping the amount of gasoline people can buy for each fossil fuel vehicle they own that runs. In time, beyond even your own, this government might be able to further control how much gasoline car collectors can buy each year but, never will gasoline completely disappear unless earth itself disappears. At least not in America.
The automobile is a way of life more than a physical possession for some of us. Something you, Ms Ocasio-Cortez, will never understand in your perfect luxury, government controlled, self-centered world in which you live. My advise to you would be to get out and see America. Oh wait! By horse or by a new Tesla?! I have an idea. The new and long awaited 2020 Shelby will be released this fall. If you’re up for a road trip, I’ll buy one and pick you up at your estate in New York, and we will drive coast to coast. Along the way we will hit a few car shows, drag events, NASCAR race or two, the SEMA Show in Las Vegas, Barrett-Jackson sale in Arizona, and if you’re nice we can stay up late and street race in Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. In the smaller cities we can hit the car cruise scene each and every night.
By the time it’s time to return to New York you won’t want to. At least not without first buying a new 2020 ZR1 Corvette! Woman, you’re making Nancy Pelosi look good! You better learn how to drive!