I personally talked to a older gentlemen while buying gas at Sams Club who told of testing a heavy car in the 60’s for one of the car manufacturers that got over 60 mpg. Never heard that in the news did you?

Check out the website above for some very interesting enlightment.

Scientists are well aware of the capabilities of fuels and advanced engines. If huge improvements in fuel efficiency were possible with a mere carburetor, they would all be publishing widely about it. But there is no magic to be had.

The old Fish Carburetor hoax is long dead. Let’s not resurrect it.

Maybe it’s time to realize that some regulation is necessary when it comes to resources that are necessary to the life of so many. Incidentally, while commentators blithely say that demand for petroleum products hasn’t subtantially decreased, they forget that in those great wastelands outside of New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle, where extensive public transportation is available, many people need their cars to do basic things like…oh…shop for food, go to the doctor, take the kids to school (oh, for the days of neighborhood schools) or even…gasp…go to work at those two jobs that are now necessary to make ends meet. And many poorer people are the ones buying the old “gas guzzlers” because they cannot afford those wonderful energy-efficient vehicles (that many more wealthy people simply choose not to buy). This is, of course, not to mention trucks, airplanes, trains, buses, and all those things that run on some form of petroleum based fuel. Or fuels necessary to cook, heat the house, or even supply electricity to those houses.

Maybe someday the government will get proactive about this problem (yeah…like they’ve done for social security, medicare, universal health care and…TA-DA, Homeland Security vis a vis Hurricane Katrina). I personally would love to give up driving…I just don’t have any alternative. I would love to use radiant heat and a wood fed stove, but that would aggravate environmentalists by denuding forests, endangering wildlife, and polluting the air. Until that time, my demand will probably remain the same, and business commentators will cluck about how demand for petroleum products hasn’t gone down, thus justifying the high prices that makes us choose between food, meager entertainment, medications, driving, and not freezing to death in winter.

Hydrogen will be a viable energy source when all oil, oil shale, coal, and natural gas are nearly completely depleted. It’s just too expensive to produce, and unless you use nuclear reactors to produce it you truly havent done the environment any favors. Storage cost will be astronomical as well.

We could all be driving electric cars if the U.S. energy consumer were’nt so afraid of Nuke power, but barring a 100 fold increase in Nuke production that makes no sense.

You can sit there and bash big oil and the car company’s all you want, but at this point in time there is no realistic alternative.

2. Gasoline is still cheaper than anything else, or that something else would be available and auto companies would hasten to adapt to it.

I bought a car in 2001 from Chrysler that was designed to run on ethanol, so it isn’t true that auto companies aren’t doing anything.

However, since ethanol holds only 2/3 the energy per gallon as gasoline, a tankful of ethanol takes me only 200 miles, but a tankful of gasoline takes me 300 miles. This means that ethanol should be priced at $2 per gallon when gasoline is at $3 per gallon. But ethanol is priced higher than $2, so it still costs me less per mile to use gasoline.

Why haven’t foreign auto makers provided the world with alternatives either? Yes, hybrids are in being sold, but why haven’t they advanced beyond them?

I long for the day when vehicles will be quiet and less poluting.

Building the interstate highway system for instance was a project that no company could really take on. I assume that most conservatives feel that worked out pretty well.

If the US gov’t wasn’t already so deeply in thrall to big business (like GM, Ford, and Chrysler who have no incentive to switch to another fuel supply for their cars and have repeatedly used gov’t to stop competition as when they crushed the technologically advanced Tucker), we’d be running our cars on hydrogen and batteries about 20 years ago . . .

Because I seriously doubt that he would put in one penny.