The future of Katahdin Mills is in good hands, the company, the governor and his group seeking to aid the mill's switching from oil to alternative renewable energy, and whoever else is involved. I assume it's in good hands, although one e-mail I received discussed the difficulties of a changeover while another questioned whether the mill owners actually want to keep it open.

That's their problem and opportunity. What they do will directly affect those working at the mill.

My problem, and yours whether or not you're a mill employee, is to survive in an era of outlandish oil and propane prices, an era in which the world is running out of fossil fuels.

I was surprised and have been thinking about ever since a public TV Nova program called ‘Cars of the future.' Dolores and I have been quite happy with our little Toyota Echo ‘Ellie' -- every personal vehicle needs a name -- which gets 45 miles per gallon on the open road and 35 in winter, when I have to idle it to defrost the windshield (retired guys no longer get out there at 5 a.m. and chop ice before they leave for work) and keep it running to keep the windshield clear and the car warm.

But Nova showed us just how old fashioned and outdated Ellie is. The internal combustion engine, the program related, boasts a 30% efficiency -- compared, let's say, to your 85% baseboard-heater oil burner or your 100% electric baseboard or whatever the efficiency of whatever other types of heating you use while snuggling up to that proverbial -- or actual -- hearthside in winter.

The internal combustion engine uses one percent of its energy to move the driver, so said the narrator.

After viewing that show, I look around at the other cars, SUVs, and pickups with which Ellie shares the road and say to myself, “Wow, a bunch of old-fashioned, totally inefficient 3,000-pound rusting buckets.

Nova showed a new car, which is currently being manufactured somewhere -- not in Maine, I'm pretty sure -- with a body made of some kind of carbon material that is so light the workers pick up the sections of the body and snap them together before gluing them into a unit at least as strong as that huge pickup I noted yesterday alongside Ellie at a red light. The pickup's engine boasted 5.7 liters. Ellie's is 1.5, and the other day when I was trapped by a motorist speeding up as I passed I noticed Ellie was going 70 when I pulled back into the right lane. She ran so smoothly, I never felt the speed. Why would you need a 5.7-liter engine that probably gets ten to 17 miles per gallon unloaded?

This new car, the Telsa, which sells for only $92,000 -- a Megabucks might pay for it, if you won -- unless you want options that are extra.

Oh yes, it runs on electricity only. No backup gasoline engine. The battery pack, the narrator said, is packed with 6,000 cells about the size of double A cells. The owners plugs it in at night.

And, if my incredulous ears heard correctly, it goes from zero to 60 in four seconds. Wow! I can't visualize a situation in which I'd need that kind of power. Just give me your standard old non-put-put electric car I can plug in at night and use no gasoline.

Chevy is test driving its Volt -- I think that's the name -- in several cities. This electric car has a tiny engine -- the size of Ellie's -- to charge the battery once in awhile, extending its range to about 400 miles from 40 without a charge. Without that engine, the driver can commute to work and back, providing the round trip is 40 miles or less, and plug it in at night.

The narrator said there is enough power right now on the grid for every car owner in America to drive one of these critters and plug them in to recharge, as long as they plug them in at other than peak hours.

So why am I paying $4.05 cents a gallon to drive Ellie? Because the electric cars aren't yet available. The narrator said Chevy, Toyota, or Honda will manufacture one before too long that we can all buy and drive to work and back.

A week or so ago I wrote about an alternative heating plan for our house, about which a local plumbing and heating dealer told me about when I said I was too tired to split wood or lug bags of coal or wood pellets. The electric-powered well-to-baseboard heat pump operates at a quarter of the current cost of oil or electric, he said. It draws the water from the well, which is about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, somehow gets heat by using that 45 degrees, and circulates it through the baseboard and domestic hot water systems.

An article I read this week states that the only caution is to regularly maintain the system to avoid any toxic materials' being discharged into the well with the returning water. I need to ask about that.

Even I can afford to run that contraption, providing it leaves my well water clean. Of course, the purchase and installation is about $5,000-$7,000, depending on factors he said and which I can't recall due to my sticker shock. The Bangor Daily News this week stated that the cost of purchasing and installing a wood-pellet boiler to heat the whole house is $10,000.

A passenger on my little bus this week told me he will install his wood-pellet stove himself at almost no cost. But, then it basically heats one room and some nearby space. I remember during that famous oil shortage??? -- during which tankers rested in Searsport harbor, moored because they were directed not to unload until the price increased sufficiently, so a ship's second officer told me which makes it hearsay rather than reliable information -- when homeowners got out their chainsaws and went back to the ‘good old days' of wood heat and splinters under the fingernails and aching backs.

A lot of those homeowners paid out a lot more than they had budgeted when their plumbing froze, because those woodstoves didn't quite get heat to where the pipes were located down in those corners.

I know, because I too heated our ranch house on Swan Lake with wood during those not-so-good-old days. Thankfully, no pipes froze.

That was then. This is now. All I need is $5,000-$7,000 to install the heat pump. Which makes my next project, when I get a chance, going online or on phone and checking out the state's Efficiency Maine program or the Maine Housing Authority's low-interest loan program for switching alternative heating. Since we're all going to be changing sooner or later to a new source of home heat, I might as well get started.

I thought this keyboard-produced hot air would warm things up in the house this damp, cold typical June Saturday morning. But it hasn't, so I'll go turn up the oil heat a notch.

Let's see, at $4.709 per gallon, that notch will cost me....um....um again....not quite sure. Guess my fourth-grade teacher was right. I am math impaired.

Oh yeah, four times what it would with that heat pump I can't yet afford.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.