Iraqs' oil the pay off all along??

Well I have never thought of ethanol as our great "savior" crop , for one reason . I have heard and read but am not sure of the of the validity of this but , due to the minerals a corn crop uses from the earth farmers either must rotate the land they use for corn production every year or face having the yield decrease each season .

One of the many things that just seems to make no sense in all of this has to do with the electric cars , while I haven't studied the damn things I haven't until recently heard of a car that regenerates it's battery power as it goes down the road .

I find the fact that this wasn't Incorporated into the first designs completely stupid as they have four wheels turning to do so .

If this is a situation of impending doom then many things need to be changed for one people everywhere must learn they can't go blasting down the highways at 90+ MPH just for amusement anymore . Oddly this alone will be one of the hardest sells as people do love their toys regardless of the danger they face "playing" with them .

Then there is the matter of the physical layout of our Nation , in the last several decades America has continued to sprawl out when in fact it should have been pulling back to prepare for this situation .

I don't know about everyone elses area but in MO they are building strip Malls at a breakneck speed when they haven't filled the last with business .

Conserving energy by walking or bike riding to work is a bad joke in this area especially in bad weather .

Back in the 70's there were news paper articles on new designs for bicycles that had canopies over them and special lanes that ran parallel to the main highways . These could travel at speeds nearing 60 MPH and if I remember correctly could seat two people one behind the other with a small trunk area . While construction costs would have been significant the fuel savings would also have been significant over the past 30 years . Yet they never came to be .

Funny how all this time the government has been ranting about America as a Nation becoming Fatter . Something like these new Bikes and special lanes for them would have helped with two problems at once .

 

Regertably I think you are spot on with that statement I figure we might have 5 years but thats just a guess on my part, before it really goes down hill fast.

OGM

 

"This is from the article you cited
" Gas turbine automobiles have low reliability, efficiency and reaction to acceleration and deceleration, and exhaust too much nitrogen dioxide."

Using corn or any other agricultural product to produce ethanol has the same problem. All the crops I can think of need nitrogen fertilizer. Production of nitrogen is very natural gas intensive. Natural gas will peak a decade or two after oil. But more importantly, alot of nitrogen fertilizer volitalizes and combines with oxygen to form nitrous oxide which is also a greenhouse gas and unfortunately is about 200 times more harmful than CO2.

 

Had an oil crisis back in the 1970's and while most of it was the arab's got PO at us, but they said also that the oil would be gone in 10 years. They were totally right. The $5 to 10 a barrel oil is gone and now the oil we are buying is comeing from deeper in the ocean than we could drill then or from countries we didn't even know about and probably didn't exit in 1970. There will always be oil available, but supply and demand might mean we use 1 % of what we use now and pay $ 600 a barrel for it. When things get bad enough we may try something else. A friend who was from Poland told me about almost everyone was using small motor scooters in the late 1940's and building roads that were 3 or so feet wide for them and that they got 60 to 70 miles a gallon. Long distances were by train. After WWW2 they couldn"t afford anything else. We could use small electric bikes or trikes for short distancews and light rail for longer distances. . The present best bikes get about 95 % of the human power applied to the wheels. The vechile weighs under 20 lbs and the cargo weighs 100 + pounds. Then there is the Humvee and I must admit they are nice, but the vechicle weighs 4000 lbs and the cargo weighs 100 + pounds. I can't even guess at what the power efficiency is. The Chinese are building a high speed rail system and we could too for what we spend on our airports. I don't know how many miles of light high speed rail you could build for the cost of Denver's new airport but it would be a good number of miles. In my mind the worst of all possible worlds would be putting off any change until things collapse and then we won't be able to replace the present transportation system with a low power replacement.