David writes: > 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? ;-)
If there's a problem with this list, it lacks imagination. The standard response seems to be one of imposing piety on the rest of the population, where everyone must drive 1970 Tercels and live in houses of no more than 500 square feet. But there's another group of people who are just as concerned about the environment as we are here but about whom no one on the list ever speaks. They're the engineers who live in Seattle and the Bay Area, and they're doing extraordinary things on the weekends, during their days off work. To these people, 78 mpg and 1200 miles on one tank of gas is considered an embarassment, even for a modern, full-sized, comfortable car. Similar to Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, let me recommend that you get thee to YouTube and watch (for instance) the video logs of Davem5321 of Seattle after he modified his Prius to convert it into a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). This video is as good place to start as any: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ufxw2lqTWDk He has a dozen or so of these short video logs of his experience with his new PHEV Prius, where he's getting between 123 to 171 mpg and 1300+ miles per tank of gas. Watch as many of his log entries as you can to get a sense of what's possible. These hobbyists, who have been performing these conversions on their own nickle now for a couple of years, are still small in number, but they're having an effect. Toyota will soon have a commercial version of this technology available. When people talk about the US consuming something on the order of 30% of the world's resources, I've always presumed that that number was calculated primarily on the basis of the consumption of petroleum, but neither the US nor the world is short of energy, nor do we need to remain trapped in a carbon-based, fossil-fuel economy. It's only a matter of imagination and engineering. The changeover away from cheap petroleum-based fuels will be expensive (as Hamlet also said, "Aye, there's the rub"), but it's certainly not impossible, and if necessary, it can occur with astounding speed, without any loss of creature comforts or the imposition of great economic hardship. Wirt Atmar
