Reading Response #11 – Fast Food

Fast Food by Mike Rdsenwald

The article Fast Food by Mike Rdsenwald is a great bit of information about how green energy and technology are making their way into new territory. The use of green products in making and powering a race car has quite an allure to many, and while it may not be the most exciting thing that the Nascar crowd might hear, the idea that the Nascar crowd may hear about it is exciting.  The article is geared towards a tech friendly audience that probably hasn’t heard of this concept before but is intrigued by it.

The article covers only one main topic which is building a race car from green products, the main point is to show that this can and is being done today. While the car costs a fortune to build, it is only the first and can pioneer new methods of using green products in auto manufacturing.
By pioneering the way towards a more sustainable auto industry and pointing out how its being done, this article is very effective in its aim.

Environmentally, a bio diesel powered, ecologically friendly race car is probably a small step. While race cars are gas hogs and do pollute quite heavily, there are relatively few of them in operation and they would be making a small dent in our environmental well being. As an indicator of what can be done though, this article has great implications environmentally and is helping to make green products more of a daily use item.

Counterarguments to this article are the fact that bio diesel has an environmental toll all its own when more crop land is cleared and grown in corn and soy to provide the vegetable oils that we use for fuel.  In pursuing this topic, I would check into the benefits of using palm or cocoa oil for bio diesel compared to using vegetable oil. The mixture of the two for this car may have reasons that are beyond my scope, but it would be interesting to find out more.

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