CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

ur family had a beautiful home in Hawaii on a point with a tremendous surf break. Manta rays were plentiful in these waters. One day Pegi and I were swimming across the bay, north of our point, and on the return swim we took the outside, meaning we were as far out into the water as we usually went, crossing the bay to the point where our home was located. It was a fair swim and the water was about forty feet deep. Sea life was plentiful in those waters. We could see fish far below us. It was as if we were flying as we looked down on them through our snorkel masks.

Those fish making their way along the sandy bottom were probably no more than two feet long. Looking ahead as I usually did, I saw four huge forms approaching us. I took Pegi’s hand in mine and brought her in close to me, and then she saw them, too. She was squeezing my hand tight and I put my arm around her, continuing forward by gently kicking and using my other hand to stabilize. The forms approached. The biggest one was about twelve feet across, and we were on a direct course toward them.

These were manta rays, moving toward us like giant slow-motion bats; the biggest things we had ever seen in the water with us, bigger by far than the dolphins we had first swum with a few years before. The rays continued toward us. I remembered that they were very mellow, like sea cows, and probably were just going about their own business, feeding on the small life in the water. They were getting blurry in our masks as the small creatures they fed on made the water around us look like jelly. At the very last moment, the giant creatures parted ways and went over and under us, gently flying by.

The manta ray is Pegi’s aumakua. Aumakua is a Hawaiian word describing a spirit guardian from the animal world, a bridge between humans and spirits. Sharks and other life of the sea and land can also be aumakua. Larry Johnson’s was a whale, so every year when the whales showed up at our home on the Big Island, we were reminded of Larry and were both happy and sad. The whales show up less regularly now, perhaps disturbed from their age-old pattern by changes in the earth’s climate, just as the jet stream has been disturbed by warming ocean water temperatures, resulting in erratic and extreme weather patterns. The disturbance is caused by global warming, which is caused by humans creating more CO₂ than the planet can consume with plant life. The CO₂ rises in the atmosphere and creates a layer around the earth, keeping heat in.

Living on an island, the damage from fossil fuels and the massive CO₂ emissions seemed even more obvious to us. We felt bad that our island’s power was coming from fossil fuels that crossed the ocean in polluting, diesel-powered tanker ships and we were doing what we could, using biodiesel renewable fuel from Maui with up to a ninety percent reduction in CO₂ emissions, and hoping to be a small part of turning the tide toward preserving the earth’s balance for our grandchildren and their children after them.

When we purchased a brand-new diesel-powered, white 2004 Ford Excursion to carry big groups of people to events and enjoy one another’s company, we named it Ray White in a not so subtle reference to Pegi’s aumakua. Diesel is much better for mileage than gasoline. Even regular petro diesel reduces emissions because of the better mileage it gets compared to gasoline. When we use biodiesel, Ray White, our biggest vehicle, puts out less CO₂ than any of our others.

Ray is now in his tenth year of service to our family and is showing no signs of weakness with his big diesel motor, powered by plants through indirect solar energy.

When we lived at the ranch, which was a much larger percentage of the time than in Hawaii, I wanted to have a clean-running vehicle and was beginning to wonder what part I could play in raising awareness of the attributes of alternative fuels. Celebrity has to have some value, and using it to raise awareness is a good thing. That is when I discovered the Hummer H1. At first, the Hummer became known because of roadside bombings in the Iraq War. We saw them on TV nightly, some jury-rigged with armor by soldiers for their own protection. Those were the H1’s. They were so huge that they took up the width of a whole lane. Then the H1’s started showing up on the streets of America, painted in bright colors and driven by a variety of folks for various reasons, which could be the subject of another book on human behavior, which I would be starring in.

The Hummer was attacked by environmentalists as the epitome of wastefulness. No cars or trucks have created the negative reaction that the Hummer did. The thought of soccer moms picking up their kids at school in these huge behemoths really turned off a lot of folks who saw it as a wasteful, CO₂-spewing symbol of all that was wrong with America. In the USA’s still wild west, some Hummer dealerships were even attacked and burned by extremist environmentalists.

To complicate matters more for the environmentalists, the conservation regulations passed by Congress, which were energetically lobbied for by big oil company lobbyists, were written specifically for cars, not SUVs. Hummers were classified as trucks, which put them outside these regulations, even though SUVs were designed and used as family vehicles. When the slightly smaller H2 came along, a lot of soccer moms got those. Next, the H3 appeared, a compact SUV smaller than the previous models. These were designed to sell more because they were smaller, but alas, still classified as trucks and outside the government’s fuel conservation regulations. Intensive lobbying of politicians backed by money from oil interests is one of the biggest problems facing America’s quest for a cleaner world.

The effect of lobbying on conservation regulations in the SUV example shows us quite clearly that government “by the people and for the people” is practically nonexistent. We have government by the corporation and for the corporation. Corporate money makes American laws. Separation of Corporation and State, a twist on “Separation of Church and State,” may be what we need. Until we have that, all laws will be made essentially by corporations and based on corporate strategies and values.

Corporations are not people. They do not have the conscience of a parent guarding a child’s safety. Corporations are driven by three-month financial reports, and until corporations lose the power they are wielding, laws will be made primarily with a view toward short-term financial gain. About $3.5 billion in lobbying is spent yearly by about 12,000 lobbyists to influence laws supposedly written in the interests of the people by 435 members of Congress and 100 senators. The majority of money to run the election campaigns of the representatives and senators who write the laws comes directly or indirectly from corporate interests.

All you have to do is step back and take a look at corporate-run government to begin to understand why the media has not presented global warming and its cause to the public as the real story of our times. Because of the corporate-occupied Federal Communications Commission, network television and printed media are now serving the corporations by not exposing the true story of climate change and the future of mankind.

There are some brave representatives and senators who oppose these laws, but so far they seem unable to overcome the forces they are up against. The people themselves will have to drop their complacency and rally behind fundamental change, take their country back, and support brave leaders.

However, this is a book about cars.