Someone give me a bullet…i wanna shoot myself

I just paid $40 to fuel up my mid-size sedan.

I hate life.

Don’t get us Eurofabulous persons started on OUR prices.

Why can’t we get affordable cars that run on 100% something-other-than-gas? There’s so many alternative sources out there and yet nobody wants to abandon expensive, polluting, scarce, terror-funding, etc oil.

Prices are not going to go down, the only solution is to stop relying on oil.

1338h4x Posted:

Why can’t we get affordable cars that run on 100% something-other-than-gas? There’s so many alternative sources out there and yet nobody wants to abandon expensive, polluting, scarce, terror-funding, etc oil.

Prices are not going to go down, the only solution is to stop relying on oil.

Altazimuth hits closer to home than you do. Yes, there are alternatives out there, and for 99% of the points they are much better than oil. However, they aren’t cheaper than oil (yet). Until oil prices rise to the point where they overshoot the alternatives for a significant period of time, we won’t see a mbum-shift in fuel choice.

Now, I’d prefer the alternatives myself, but keep in mind with electric cars (including hybrids) that the batteries still use Nickel. Lots and lots and lots of nickel, which is a poisonous pollutant. I’ve read about a plant up north (I believe it was in Canada, but don’t quote me) where the land around the plant is so dead Hollywood uses it for “Other Planet” scenes.

Sancdar Posted:

You’re buddies with Bush?

Like i said….i dont know much. Just wondering what would be the best bet. Looked up a little and personally i think hydrogen would be a great long term solution. Its just too expensive right now.

One difficulty with gas prices is it’s hard to know how much is just social reflexivity. If the public hears and is talking about higher gas prices, producers can get away with raising prices, which means distributors raise prices. Not that there aren’t legit reasons for the increase- this sort of mechanism just exacerbates the problem.

The bumessments of the different alternatives above all sounds right from what I’ve heard- personally, I’m hoping for solar development, it seems to have the fewest downsides.

2 things that don’t work-

1-Alaskan drilling may or may not be effective, but the costs, environmental and economic, would be huge. It also would be a temporary respite, at best.

2-Y’know those “Coal-America’s clean power” ads on TV? They’re full of ****. That should be obvious from how they’re done, but I needed to get that out there anyways.

TheAlbatross Posted:

Like i said….i dont know much. Just wondering what would be the best bet. Looked up a little and personally i think hydrogen would be a great long term solution. Its just too expensive right now.

Hydrogen won’t work. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it is a means to store energy. In other words, we will buy oil to burn to make the hydrogen in the first place. But hey- your CAR won’t be polluting, just the factories that make the hydrogen.

However a flex- fuel vehicle can burn gasoline, ethanol or methanol for only about 100-200 added to the sticker price. Ethanol is also a bad choice in the long run, because it cuts into our food supplies thus is only good as a short term option. Methanol, on the other hand is a sustainable long term fix. Cheap and easy to manufacture- see the quote below:

“This brings us to methanol, the simplest liquid fuel molecule known to chemistry. Commonly called “wood alcohol” because it can be readily produced from wood, it can also be manufactured out of virtually any kind of organic material, including every kind of biombum (whether edible or not), as well as coal, natural gas, human and animal metabolic wastes, and municipal trash. Since its potential sources are so vast, varied, and cheap, methanol promises to be an inexpensive fuel. In fact, it already is: during the summer of 2007, the wholesale price of methanol, manufactured and sold without a subsidy, was $0.93 per gallon. Methanol has about 54 percent the energy density of gasoline, so this price is the equivalent of gasoline selling for $1.70 per gallon (before taxes).”

(taken from http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/18/zubrin.htm)

The problem is making it available in gas stations- that would require lots of cars that can use it so people would buy it. Which probably won’t ever happen because that would require a government mandate, and both parties in our government are in the pocket of Big Oil, not to mention the automakers.

Vuron Posted:

Corn-based ethanol is crap, the amount of fossil fuels needed to produce a single gallon of corn-based biodiesel is a very significant percentage. Considering corn-based ethanol has poor energy density (1 gallon of ethanol will get you significantly less miles in your car) domestic corn-based ethanol is basically a government subsidy to big agribusinesses such as ADM. That’s not even getting into the impact corn-based ethanol subsidies have had

Algae-based Biodiesel seems to be the obvious answer as the US could likely make do with roughly 140 billion gallons of biodiesel a year. If current estimates concerning the use of algae-based biodiesel is that 15,000 square miles of algae ponds would be capable of producing the neede biombum to generate that much biodiesel.

Currently the technology isn’t quite there but it definitely seems like a solid long term solution. If you combine the use of biodiesel with existing hybrid technologies you can get pretty impressive MPG totals, for example the Dodge Intrepid ESX3, built under Clinton’s PNGV program – a full-size diesel electric hybrid sedan that averaged 72 mpg in mixed driving .

i love you, you’re one of the only people i know that knows of that fact too. it takes nearly a gallon of fossil fuels in order to make a gallon of biodiesel. then the biodiesel is burned in the vehicle. it really isn’t very efficient.

i think electric cars would be our best bet if we could get solar and wind going more since they’re pretty pollution-free. hydro-electric is a bad idea since the dams that are required for it have a huge environmental impact. and i hate to say it, but discounting the possibility of meltdowns nuclear is a pretty clean way of getting energy too. just try telling that to a hippy.

Gas isn’t that bad. Stop whining. Look at the prices in Europe, Amerifabulous person. You are still 2 dollars below the average for them! Quit your yammering and grow a pair, you have just been so damned lucky for the last couple years that you don’t notice the ****hole the rest of the world lives in.