Prove it! (Touch & Go, May 19 issue) OR WHAT, you’ll continue to stick your head in the sand? Tom Norton’s article ridiculing gloom-and-doom, Henny-Pennys may have been cute, but was sadly shortsighted.
Whether one wants to accept what most scientists already understand about the limits of future oil and the causes of global warming, the high cost of gasoline is affecting our freedom to fly. I hardly think that promoting hydrogen or alcohol for future use in internal combustion engines is being an alarmist. Protecting our future ability to continue to fly is positive. If the solutions to convert away from petroleum products were easy, we would have already implemented them.
Finding ways to produce and use new sources of energy for our engines is a technological problem; I trust and believe in our ingenuity to be solvable. Ridiculing such attempts or those who promote them is not only foolish and dangerous to the future of general aviation, but harmful to the country. Our continued dependence on unreliable foreign oil is not in our long-term best interests. Being an apologist for what both sides of the aisle call exorbitant “wind fall” profits by the oil companies is silly.
This is one “alarmist greenie” who will continue to enjoy flying his 1957 Pacer using 100LL, but hopes one day for his grandchildren’s or their grandchildren’s sake that he will in the future fly using alcohol, hydrogen or, who knows, maybe even vegetable oil.
And, by the way, “scientific theories” are not based on speculation or guessing, they are based on measurable facts that have been substantiated by many, over long periods of time. To paraphrase a great scientist: It takes many facts to prove a theory but only one to destroy it.
Stephen Adams
Lopez Island, Wash.