Profiles in Cowardice

    The meaning of the closure of the General Motors Fuel Cell Research Center in Honeoye Falls is that once again as a nation, and as a community, we have failed to rally the political forces necessary to free our dependence on foreign oil.  The decision says, we will again fold to the forces of Big Oil over the logical alternative—hydrogen fuel.  The fuel cell powered automobile technology will be sequestered back to the home headquarters in Detroit, never to be heard from again.  What a lost opportunity!  What a study in “profiles in cowardice” on the part of our local leaders.  From Senator Alessi, whose district includes Honeoye Falls, to Danny Wegman and UR President Seligman, our  Governor Cuomo, and our US senators Gellibrand and Schumer, the story is one of failure of leadership.  All the more tragic is the failure of our federal government, which as a consequence of the bailout owns 25% of the stock in General Motors, to exert any effort what-so-ever.
   They did not wish to stand and fight.  Too bad.  We could have started building solar-hydrogen stations fueled by cheap solar panls and water, and in the process lessened foreign oil depencency, improved the greening of the environment, and moved forward with the solution to unemployment  in a major way. We could have been the fulcrum toward correcting our international accounts deficit.  We could have made the argument for natural gasfracking moot.  But history is repeating itself, is it not?  We could have had the Hadron Super Collider and world class high energy physics technology locate in Wayne County twenty years ago, but we again had no leadership.  In the end it is we the people who failed ourselves.