My friend, NJ, has a point that hybrid vehicles in a sense, simply prolong our use of fossil fuels by making vehicles that still use gasoline, but are more fuel efficient. I read in the Evansville Courier & Press that the first Kentucky-made Toyota Camry came off the assembly line this week. This vehicle is supposed to get 43 miles per gallon on the highway and 37 in the city. The Camry hybrid uses a 147 horsepower four-cylinder engine and 40 horsepower electric motor. According to the article, 21,430 hybrid Camry's had been sold in the U.S. as of September.

Although I think it's great that vehicles can be more fuel-efficient in this manner and thereby delay the inevitable tapping out of our oil supplies, maybe the hydrogen fuel cell is still the way to go. The more I read about hybrid vehicles and the "new" diesel vehicles, the more I think that they are akin to a good bandage to stop the bleeding for a while, but not a permanent cure for the wound. With a hybrid, we are definitely thinking outside the box to a great extent, just to maximize the efficiency of the vehicle altogether and in some cases, to introduce an ethanol mix to make the use of gasoline more secondary. Yet, by providing Camry hybrids and Prius hybrids to those who really seem to care about the environment and conserving foreign oil are we simply paving the way for manufacturers to develop Escalade hybrids and Expedition hybrids that get maybe 23 miles to a gallon? While this might improve the situation a bit, since many Americans are determined to drive SUV's no matter what, it might delay our real commitment to an alternative that will completely take us outside the fossil fuel box. People will think they've done their part to conserve, even while driving a vehicle that can seat 10, just because it happens to be labeled a hybrid.

The same idea would likely hold true if we started converting more coal to fuel. Even if this could be used for vehicles and might reduce our dependence on foreign oil, it does not eliminate our dependence on a finite resource and will simply delay our complete transition to alternative energy to run our vehicles. Until our vehicles can run completely on something we can replenish easily, we are still going to be addicted to fossil fuels in some respect.