I happened yesterday on this article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch about the Chevy Volt. GM is throwing tons of resources into a breakneck schedule to produce an electric powered car that is dramatically more advanced than the hybrids currently on the market. The question is whether they can have the technology developed in time for release date.

It's sort of inspiring to see an American company try something so ambitious.

On a related note, I've been finding myself thinking more and more about alternative energy sources -- or more specifically non-fossil fuel energy sources. Politically, I've always been pretty progressive on environmental issues. I was reared to it in a way since my father was a marine botanist -- so these concerns and points of interest were some of the building blocks of my childhood. But for all that, as I got older and thought more about politics and began to write about it for a public audience, I cannot say it's ever been a real focus for me. But that's changed over the last several months: most of the key issues that face us today, from environmental issues proper, to our geostrategic position vs. other great powers and the future of our economy, all turn on our reliance on fossil fuels. Not just 'foreign' ones, all of them. It's not hard to imagine historians of 50 or 100 years from now writing the history of our period -- stretching back almost forty years now -- around that central focus.