Fuel Conservation a must?

[adaminthemiddle]

With the average gas price up over $2.00 a gallon, I got curious as to what you guys thought about fuel conservation.

Would you agree that we need to make major moves to look for fuel alternatives? For instance: more subway/bus systems; electric cars; cars that run not on gasoline, but on something such as water, vegetable oil, hydrogen, or something similar; or at least increasing fuel efficiency (gas mileage) for vehicles? (I believe, and I've read the articles and seen the proof to back me, that all these are easily possible in the immediate future.)

Should we look for easier, better methods of transportation?

Or should we simply stick to our 20 mpg cars and $2/gallon (for now, anyway) gas?

[Diemos3211]

Hydrogen is not such a great idea. It's a net loss energy source, and at the moment it comes from cracking natural gas, IIRC.

I think the real key is to look for alternative energy sources. Asking people to drive small cars and ride the bus is probably not going to work very well, and without an alternative source for power generation most of those other things fall flat as well. Barring the debut of nanomechnical manufacturing (which would theoretically produce manufactured goods energy efficient enough to make solar power viable), cold fusion or other sci-fi technologies we will need to come up with something to produce a lot of electricity before we even start looking at electric cars and the like.

I have no idea what alternative energy source might fit the bill, but we really need to be putting more effort into looking for it.

[Geezer38]

Well, first of all, $2.00/U.S. gallon gas is pretty cheap from my viewpoint, we are paying about $4.00/U.S. gallon and I understand that it's over $5.00/U.S. gallon in Europe.

Energy is energy, it hardly matters whether it is electricity or from some other source, it will all move an automobile or scooter. The big problem is providing that energy to the consumer without polluting the biosphere and at an economical rate. Hydro produced electricity would be a great source, so would wind power. Alexander Gorlov, an engineering professor at Boston's Northeastern University, has developed a helical turbine that efficiently harvests energy from streams and tidal bores without dams. I can see a lot of local waters that could be harvested without ecological damage.

I was really impressed when we visited California, we saw huge tracts of windmills and solar panels producing electricity. It seems to me that electricity might be the answer since every home could be a filling station. Some years ago, I read an article that claimed solar power could be harvested by satellites in orbit and beamed to ground receivers as microwaves. I wonder whatever happened to that idea?

I'm proud of my little Honda, it gets pretty good milage, but when I visited a Toyota dealer recently, I was astounded my some of the milage figures on small SUV's, and next year, Toyota will be selling the Highlander SUV as a hybrid, gas/electric. They claim it will have very high mileage and lots of power. These guys are good! The competition they provide to the domestic brands is forcing everyone to build better more economical cars, thats good for all of us!

[Diemos3211]

Actually from what I've been reading I think biodiesel may be the best way to go at the moment. It still has some of the same problem w/r/t pollution as current petroleum fuels, but it seems to be feasible and does not require massive re-tooling of the entire damn industrial infrastructure. Current gasoline transport/retail infrastructure could be used without modification and diesel engines are a well known and easily available technology. If we used algae as the feedstock for fuel production we wouldn't even really have to use farmland for feedstock production. Current refineries would be capable of refining the bio-derived oil to diesel. Bio-diesel is also cleaner than current petroleum fuels, though as I said it still produces some pollution in the form of CO2.
The figures I've seen for this indicate that to set up algae farms sufficient to entirely replace the U.S. import of oil in the Sonora desert would cost in the neighborhood of $87 billion, which is pretty do-able.
So, who wants to go buy a big-ass truck with me?;)
(okay, or a VW)