Imagine a car that never needs an oil change or a tune-up and is quieter and cheaper than gas-powered cars — even hybrids. Imagine a car with zero emissions. We need not imagine; such a car exists — it’s the electric vehicle, also called the EV or the electric car.
  
In the mid-1990s, California mandated that state automakers offer zero-emission vehicles for sale or lease, and automakers put EVs on the market.
    I learned about the EV by watching Chris Paine’s masterful documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? (available on DVD). The film suggests that every new car bought in California — and beyond — could have zero emissions. If that’s true, why don’t more of us know about (or drive!) electric vehicles?
    The answer lies, in part, in the successful lobbying against EVs by the automobile and petroleum industries. They fought hard against the California Air Resources Board, which eventually repealed the mandate for automakers. And when the mandate was repealed, all the electric vehicles that had been leased to customers — such as the General Motors EV1, the Honda EV Plus, the Ford Ranger EV, the Nissan Altra EV, and the Chevy S10 EV — were reclaimed by the auto companies and destroyed. I actually burst into tears when the film showed the destruction of the General Motors EV1 fleet.
    The website for Chris Paine’s film asks this enticing question: Who Saved the Electric Car? The answer might be found at pluginamerica.org, a website dedicated to promoting “plug-in” vehicles.
    It isn’t necessarily news that industry suppresses invention, but it likely is much more widespread than we might think. An inventor once told me that he focused on inventions that would cause certain profitable industry products to become obsolete. Then he approached the companies that made those profitable products and offered to sell them his patents. The companies leapt at the chance to stifle the production of this man’s inventions, which potentially could have put them out of business.
    When I was researching my second book, Grub, I discovered that Syngenta, one of the world’s largest pesticide manufacturers and a maker of atrazine, the most widely used herbicide in the U.S., distributes a less-toxic version in Europe — and it works just as well.
    A friend who had become a farmer once told me her biggest concern was how to get great yields without using man-made fertilizers. As her thumb grew greener, she discovered that it wasn’t hard to get her crops to grow. In fact, it was darn easy. “We’ve been hoodwinked,” she said. “Plants want to grow; [we’re] just facilitating them.”
    I certainly don’t presume that we have all the answers. Still, we have many more solutions than you or I realize. There is a lot of innovation in the private sector, but the issue becomes how we respond to that innovation — and what we can do to ensure that promising solutions are not crushed.

Anna Lappé