Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Apples and oranges

Wasted resources are wasted resources...
SteveS — (archived)

but somehow it's OK just to concentrate on the apples.

Natural gas is wasted far more than gasoline IMO. Thousands of products that consumer could live without are made annually with natural gas consumption but those products don't receive the scrutiny of apples yet when the natural gas is spent, it's not coming back.

Gasoline is less than half (around 45%) of a barrel of crude oils final product but it's the most popular consumer product that the refineries control.

When we should be demanding from the industry we are demanding of the consumer with prejudice. Demanding that consumers use less is not going to make advancements in alternative, cleaner, efficient, eco friendly fuels but put it off for decades. If everybody drove a Jetta type vehicle the oil industry would have you just where they wanted you, stuck in gasoline heaven for an other 100 years.

Alternative fuels like byproducts of beans (castor oil) and corn (vegetable oil) have been in use since the 70's in other countries and we should be demanding them in the US. I'm sure if we had pursued this alternative more stringently, the technology advancements would have made it a worthwhile fuel by now and the automotive would have followed with new compatible power plants.

The oil industry will not give way easily to the farmers unless they have no choice.

Many years ago a friend of mine tried to get me to buy land with him in the desert to farm a plant pronounced ho-ho from which a byproduct is a oil that would replace whale oils that were used on military tanks. The uniqueness of the ho-ho oil was that sand didn't adhere to it like most other oils and it grew well in the desert (so he said). He never drilled a well, passed away since, and I've never heard more of ho-ho. The Pentagon paragraph made me think of it.

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