Ernie All good advice for conserving energy which needs to be done however I was referring to the ability of the total population and not the strongly committed that subscribe to ECOLOG. I am severely pessimistic about the the will of the rest of America.
With regards other points: On Feb 13, 2008, at 10:46 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > (My best: 78 mpg, 1200 miles on one take of fuel-- > but, hey, that's a little extreme.) What model of Vespa were you driving? ;-) > > With proper conservation /efficiency steps first, and some good new > research, I think biofuels have a proper role to play in the > earth's energy future. Yes, so do I, just not as large as what ADM envisions. > I think the Science authors said that too. Can biofuels be > sustainable? > Well, I have been eating biofuels (e.g., carrots, bread and > butter, etc.) for > years. Can't say for sure that they are sustainable but they > taste good and > supply the necessary BTUs /kcals. So if I follow your reasoning: Humans consume on average 2500 kilocalories (C) daily vs 31,000 C in a gallon gasoline, for arguments sake lets say ethanol contains 3/4 the caloric content of gasoline. the average American car gets 25 mi gallon (liberal estimate)and travels 15,000 mi/yr (conservative estimate) requiring 1.6 gallons of gasoline (2.13 gallons ethanol) or 49,522.5 C per day. This represents 19.8 times as much energy than a human requires daily. So to replace gasoline with ethanol American farmers (oh yes and Chilean and Chinese and Australian...) would have to provide nearly 20 times as much caloric content as they do currently. And that is only for automobiles; not counting trains, buses, ships, tractors, trucks and airplanes. > The entire world was running on mostly > biofuels before about 1901 when some Texans started messing things > up. In 1900 there were 8000 cars on the road, mostly owned by the uber- class and 76,094,000 people in the US. Today there are 300,000,000 people and nearly as many (250,000,000) cars. Does that sound sustainable to you? David Bryant
