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Apr. 27th, 2006 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesI had something I wanted to write about, and now I've forgotten what it was. In lieu thereof...
Gas is rapidly approaching being more expensive per gallon than milk. I think there's something wrong with that, but I can't decide whether it's that gas has been stupidly cheap up to now, or whether it's that milk is stupidly expensive. (The other problem, of course, is that it takes gas to transport milk, so the price of milk goes up when the price of gas goes up.)
The reason no other source of energy is as efficient as fossil fuel is that nobody has really developed any other sources of energy yet. I am not a mechanic, but tell me the first gas engines were efficient and I'll laugh at you. I'm half-convinced biodiesel would work if we stopped paying farmers not to grow things, started developing biodiesel technology that runs on soybeans, and started paying farmers to grow soybeans.
I wonder what would have happened if, instead of sinking all that money into interstate highways, we had sunk it into rail systems (by which I mean interstate and intrastate, and light rail) or something somewhat more public than "everybody go out and buy your own car"? (Paging S.M. Stirling...)
Gas is rapidly approaching being more expensive per gallon than milk. I think there's something wrong with that, but I can't decide whether it's that gas has been stupidly cheap up to now, or whether it's that milk is stupidly expensive. (The other problem, of course, is that it takes gas to transport milk, so the price of milk goes up when the price of gas goes up.)
The reason no other source of energy is as efficient as fossil fuel is that nobody has really developed any other sources of energy yet. I am not a mechanic, but tell me the first gas engines were efficient and I'll laugh at you. I'm half-convinced biodiesel would work if we stopped paying farmers not to grow things, started developing biodiesel technology that runs on soybeans, and started paying farmers to grow soybeans.
I wonder what would have happened if, instead of sinking all that money into interstate highways, we had sunk it into rail systems (by which I mean interstate and intrastate, and light rail) or something somewhat more public than "everybody go out and buy your own car"? (Paging S.M. Stirling...)
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Re: Agreement, to a certain extent.
Date: 2006-04-27 08:43 pm (UTC)