More Drilling in America Issue is Silly

[TheRealMafoo]

Rath said:

TheRealMafoo said:

stof said:
It's weird to think that one day, people will look back on the era of Oil, and wonder how we could be so short sighted as to just keep trying to squeeze as much as we could out of the planet while knowing full well that it was a finite resource.

 

That won't happen. We will do with oil what we did with every other form of energy. Find something better before we run out of it.

I said to my friends 5 years ago, that the only way to get off of oil, is for Gas to go to $5.00 a gallon.

Nothing sparks innovation like capitalism. The government can spend billions over many years, and never come up with what Toyota can in a few years, if profit is involved.

Now that gas is high, we have dozens of options coming out. Air powered cars, Plug in's, Diesels entering the US again, Hydrogen Electric hybrids, Natural Gas....

The alternative fuel market is going like crazy, and it has nothing to do with government involvement.

Yes it will, humanity has never had a source of energy that we have depended upon as much as oil and we certainly have never managed to go through any other resource like we do oil. Future generations will find the idea of us sucking the planet almost entirely dry of a resource quite interesting I think.

Now with some of your ideas (natural gas, hybrids and diesels) we encounter the problem that they still rely on fossil fuels. The others are more sensible alternative fuels for cars, though I had never heard of air power being seriously considered (though I have heard of a modern steam powered car). Hydrogen has the problem of a complete lack of infrastructure - it would take billions of dollars in investments to get hydrogen stations around the place. Electric cars are for the forseeable future what will replace gasoline.

@HappySqurriel. Its not just environmental organisations researching climate change. Its environmental scientists in general and there is undeniable evidence that warming is happening and a fairly strong consensus that its anthropogenic. There is of course much less of a consensus what the actual effects of this will be.

 

 

Air powered cars are not a prototype, they are going on sale.

http://www.autoblog.com/2007/06/01/worlds-first-air-powered-car-introduced/

The nice thing about diesel, is we can grow it. I like biodiesel the best because the cars perform the best on it. Low maintenance, no batteries and all that stuff.

I don't think we should look at a solution as being the next. I hope all of them thrive, like the PS3, 360 and Wii :p

Oh, and Ghost. I used the Military GPS handhelds. They were several thousand dollars and huge. At the same time, when they became commercially sold, they became 1/4 the size, and cost 1/10th the price. They also had far more features.

The government is good at producing things we would not produce in a commercial market, like alternative fuels when gas cost a $1.00. But if there is a market for something, the government can not remotely compete with commercial companies when it comes to innovation.