This era of ours seems to turn everything on its head in the interest of short-term, short-sighted economic gains that look good an annual reports. The energy and auto industries operate with same foolishness as the pharma industry. In pharma, they are constantly concocting and discovering new compounds and then trying to create or discover "new" diseases by which to make money from them (honestly, "restless leg syndrome?" that deserves an award of some kind for "creativity" ... creating a disease, that is, to target with the compound). So, we should be little surprised that while technology continues to come up with new things, that we get very little progress from many of those things. If car companies aren't innovating with super-high mileage vehicles, there is probably some hidden agenda preventing them from doing it, as the technological wherewithal certainly is inches away from being commercialized. It would hardly surprise if we learn years from now that the auto firms held back technology while waiting for their secret partners in the energy sector to devise ways to monopolize the delivery side of the energy. No doubt that companies like Honda, Mercedes, Audi, etc. already have ways to put a 100mpg car on the road. No whether this is some kind of conspiratorial thing or simply a matter of there not being enough money in it yet, I have no clue. I do know that governments can incent certain useful behaviors among citizens and corporations. High petrol prices on the Continent and GB, as Roger will surely attest, have had the impact of changing behaviors of the consumers and the producers. Probably not such a bad thing. Perhaps six dollar or higher per gallon gas prices in the US would be a good kick in our pants. If achieved through taxing fuel at higher rates, the money could go to improving mass transit infrastructure which provides far great efficiency that traveling alone even in Sepiareverb's former 50mpg Honda (though, living out the woods as you do, mass transit can only be part of long-term solution). Here in the US, rather than committing resources to a solution like that, some politicians insist on going the opposite way (the foolish governor of my own state of New Jersey for example, cutting a $3B NYC to NJ mass transit project that would take many cars of the road, cut congestion, cut fuel use, open the roads for trucks and buses, boost economic activity, enabled business to have better infrastructure to move goods, etc.).
Anyway, Roger, what must we do to pressure you into upgrading that Landie with a propert 2.4L diesel power plant and get you running it on french fry/fish & chip grease? You of all people should love the DIY aspect of this.
To "Whatever": global warming is BS. Climate change isn't. Some of those mountains of snow that dumped on us on both sides of the Atlantic are no doubt due to shifting weather patterns. If it warms in the normally coldest places, all that released moisture and carbon dioxide has to have some unpredictable impact on climate elsewhere. Whether humans caused this all by themselves with industrialization or we're simply attenuating/accentuating natural long-cycle weather patterns hardly matters. What does matter is that our behavior is having an impact that wouldn't be happening quite the way it is without us here. Denying it isn't going to make it go away and whining about it isn't going to fix it. No one can know for sure what level of impact we're having on such a complex system, but anyone who totally denies that our immense input has no affect is surely deluding himself. If you doubt that shifts in temperature can impact things in unpredictable ways, next time you process some film, do an experiment. Do one roll at 80 degrees and another roll of the exact same film 65 degrees F without changing any of your other parameters. Let us know which roll works best for you. Then, extrapolate that set of results by a trillion or rolls of film. The weather is the result of an awful lot of complex factors, some surely as-yet unknown to us and others while known, still poorly understood. That doesn't moot the notion that all that crap we've been pumping in to the air for 150+ years is having an impact. Now, for all we know, that impact is aggravating or exacerbating some other process (the earth wobbling as it sometimes does on its axis), is way, way beyond my limited scientific understanding.
As to how much petroleum is still trapped under the earth's crust and oceans, I have no idea and chances are that even the best geologists and seismologists don't either. What is known is that wherever it is and however much of there is, it's getting harder and harder to get at without making a horrible mess. Even the big oil companies seem to realize it's smart to invest some of their record-breaking profits into alternative sources as things like fracking may not be good long-term ideas. This ought to cut across ideological fault lines. If growing algae can produce synth fuels and lubes that don't ruin the Gulf of Mexico and can be scaled so as to be economically viable, why wouldn't we be aggressively pursing this? Then, Roger can run his Rover on seaweed.
