Extreme Green

The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity; hydrogen can easily be produced in a controllable form from water; and stupidity will either misapply it ... or just plain keep it suppressed.

A heavy metal guitarist named Carl Cella doled out the preceding bit of wisdom back in 1995 in an article about how to run a car on hydrogen extracted from water. He included specific, hand-drawn schematics that looked like they might actually work, but I just don't trust "the madman behind the heavy metal band Rampage" enough to install a homemade reactor in my trunk ... yet.

Fortunately, headbangers aren't the only ones getting lean, mean and green. There's a gaggle of supersmart greenies developing all kinds of cheap, clean sources of energy that have nothing to do with fossil fuels, and that are often much safer than driving around town with a homemade reactor in your trunk.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's credibility on environmental issues is going up in smoke. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that the administration, in an unprecedented move, wants to take away the power of individual states to make their own environmental regulations, superseding them with new -- and weaker -- federal guidelines. What that means is that some of the stricter controls that some states have adopted regarding everything from air quality to clean drinking water are threatened.

Granted, the regulations aren't directly impeding the progress of green technology, but yet another backward stride toward a dirtier environment doesn't say much for the administration's leadership role in a move towards cleaner, more efficient sources of energy -- plus it just sucks.

In the face of this horrendous knuckle-dragging leadership at the national level, greensters are nevertheless pushing forward with all manner of kick-ass environmentally friendly technology. Even conservatives are waking up and smelling the biodiesel. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently exhorted President Bush to "embark on a Manhattan project to increase fuel efficiency and slash the cost of alternative energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Yes, it will take time, but gradually it will make us more secure as a nation, it will shrink the price of oil."

All true, but Friedman doesn't have the luxury of sharing with you all the groovy pie-in-the-sky possibilities of green energy, most of which already exist today. We're talking cars driven around powered by algae, booze, vegetable oil or just plain old water. We're talking about mushrooms to save the world. And yeah, we're talking about plugging a toaster oven -- or a power plant, for that matter -- right into the giant capacitor we call Earth.

Sound impossible? Tell that to a man who carved out his place in history playing with lightning.

A Short Tribute to Nikola Tesla

No, I'm not talking about Thomas Edison, although the Serbian inventor extraordinaire Nikola Tesla did work with Edison as a gofer for a while. But while Edison fathered direct current (DC), Tesla invented the alternating current (AC) that has since become the basis of power as we know it. He also invented radio. Stories of a high-powered death ray with which he accidentally incinerated a huge chunk of forest in Siberia, and of a microwave beam he used to send Nazi submarines into another dimension, are the stuff of legend and are great fodder for fascinating conspiracy theories.

But he is most famous for the visually stunning Tesla coil, the largest of which reportedly created thunder audible from 15 miles away, and discharged 12-million-volt, 100-foot-long electrical sparks. His dream was to create a machine that would produce unlimited amounts of energy, which could be transmitted wirelessly through the earth. Despite many attempts, Tesla never got the funding he needed to give it a go. Even still, he's the unsung hero of a legion of science geeks and conspiracy theorists who believe that Tesla held the key to unlimited free energy.