The following is an exclusive excerpt from podcast king Adam Carolla’s upcoming book President Me: The America That’s in My Head:
CHAPTER TWO–The Department of Energy (Fossil Fuels and Alternative Energy)
I’m a car guy, so I know that engines can be converted easily to work off of natural gas. They perform exactly the same. In fact, if we switched to natural gas we could get rid of catalytic converters. We’d not only save in gas, but we’d cut $500 from the manufacturing cost of each car and thousands in the disposal of the heavy metals contained in catalytic converters.
Why all the fear? Natural gas is the same stuff that’s coming out of the stove in your apartment. Why not in your car? That’s the disconnect. My Prius-loving Los Angeleno friends conveniently forget that the batteries in those cars are being charged by a coal-fired electricity plant. Fracking isn’t nearly as dangerous as coal mining. I know we all want a perfect, risk-free fuel, but you know what? Shit happens. Nothing can have a zero risk factor. There’s no such thing. So let’s just minimize the risk. One way to do that is to get our fuel from home, not from people who then use that money to buy gold toilets and fund terrorism.
Shouldn’t we have learned this lesson in the seventies? I lived in California in 1973 during the OPEC embargo. I remember sitting in my mom’s VW squareback waiting in rationing lines based on whether you had an odd- or even-numbered license plate. And this was when gas had skyrocketed to forty cents a gallon!
At that same time we had assholes like Martin Sheen chaining themselves to bulldozers with their “No Nukes” message. Like fracking, I think that was a nomenclature problem. “Nuclear” sounded scary. It was the same thing we were constantly being told about how the Russians were going to drop on us, so everyone got paranoid, conveniently forgetting that with nuclear power you can have something the size of a tennis ball powering an aircraft carrier the size of Cowboys Stadium, and uses more electricity, for years with no problems and zero pollution.
So because of all that sky-is-falling bullshit we continue to power our country with the black shit sucked from the ground underneath the worst people on the planet.
Except that we can actually get some of it from the second-worst place on the planet–Alaska.
Alaska seems like the most rough-and-tumble spot in the world. Everyone there seems to be running from something in the Lower 48, whether it’s the law, the tax man, or their ex. Alaska’s where you go to forget your past, especially when you owe your past a shitload in child support. The state motto should be “Love fishing but hate your kids? Alaska.” Forget the Jackass movies. I’d like to do a hidden-camera show where we get a guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache, put him in an ATF windbreaker, have him walk into any Alaska bar or honky-tonk after quitting time, and say, “I have a warrant for . . .” and just watch everyone jump out the window. It’s never “I was born and raised in Alaska, lived here my whole life.” It’s usually something like, “My business partner faked his own death and then tried to kill me, but that was before my wife had her gender reassignment . . .” Basically Alaska is the cold-weather Florida. It’s Florida without the Jews. The state capital should be spelled “Jew? NO!”
I’m not in love with Sarah Palin but I was completely fine with her “Drill, baby, drill!” message. We can do that easily without screwing with the caribou. And fuck the caribou anyway. What did they ever do for us? Can you imagine the horror of living in a caribou-free world? I can and I’m fine with it.
But now we have guys like Mark Ruffalo picking up the blowhard actor/environmentalist torch from Marty Sheen, except Mark is bitching about fracking. Well, here’s my message back to Mr. Ruffalo and all the other actors weighing in on this issue. How about some answers? If you’ve got some ideas, I’m wide fucking open. But until then how about you shut the fuck up. Ten years ago every celebrity was an expert on AIDS; now they’ve all become experts on “climate change.” We should put all these blowhards in front of windmills and power the country with their hot air.
President Me: The America That’s in My Head hits book stores May 13, 2014.
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