The skyrocketing costs of gasoline, Diesel fuel, and other related petroleum products has got to be the mother of all rip-offs, permitted, perhaps even aided and abetted by the Federal Government and their state-level satellite governments! Is there any real justification for these unprecedented price jumps!? None that I can see! There’s been a lot of crap-talk about not enough oil refiners, law of supply & demand, ect., but as far as I am concerned, it’s all just crap! And why isn’t the President and Congress, not to mention the state-level government officials, doing anything about it? Simple: they’ve been given a lot of bribes—excuse me, I meant campaign contributions—by the oil conglomerates and now they ‘owe their souls to the oil-patch store.’, to paraphrase an old song.
What can we the common people do about this? I have one answer: Quit buying their damned oil!
I have personally retired my car for almost all local travel starting today (Saturday, April 2nd, 2005) and am replacing it with this mode of transportation:
I do have a trailer for it (not shown) and thank God I do! I bet I’m really gonna need it, too!
The image below was just a joke, but now it’s getting very close to being all too real! Only by bypassing the oil conglomerates’ death-grip on our collective throats via the gasoline and diesel-fuel pumps can we hope to escape disaster!
There are several ways of evading their clutches. The first is ‘bio-Diesel’, which is just plain old soybean oil—put that in your Diesel’s fuel tank next time. You don’t need to do anything else; just top off your tank, crank ‘er up and away you go.
Another, do-able for people with standard gasoline engine-powered vehicles, is the venerable gazogene that saw widespread use in France (and probably the rest of Occupied Europe as well) during WW#2 when the Nazi Occupation Forces took almost all gasoline and Diesel fuel for their own consumption.
Essentially it involves mounting a charcoal burner on your car or truck and funneling the fumes emitted into the engine fuel line and burning it in lieu of gasoline. The manual shown below—once available from FEMA (Hmmm—wonder if it still is? Thank God I have two copies!) offers step-by-step guidelines on how to turn your car, truck, tractor, ect., into a gazogene. (Try ordering a copy or two from FEMA and see if you can get one!)
And here are a couple of other good books—and I pray to God they can still be had! Brown’s Alcohol Motor Fuel Cookbook is the best bar none for guiding you (or your mechanic) through the process of converting a gasoline-burning engine to an alcohol-burning one. The Mother Earth News Handbook Of Homemade Power is about the best overall book on this subject, in my opinion. Try to get them both!
Of course, the oil-patch plutocrats will take steps to try and shut down these options—anything from getting their government bootlickers to declare the gazogene an environmental polluter (it may be, to some extent, but certainly no worse than existing internal-combustion engine-generated exhaust fumes) and the bio-Diesel & alcohol-conversions shut down by pressuring the auto industry to void the warranties of vehicles that are so converted.
Be kinda hard for them to shut down the bicycles, however. But we must begin now to free ourselves from dependence upon these oil conglomerates. We must break their death-grip stranglehold on us ASAP!
And if the Governments try to shut down these alternatives, and they will not heed we the people, then I fear that the only alternative will be this one:
“But when oppression would lift its head, or a tyrant would be lord,