Quote:My personal position? I haven't even been inside a car in nearly two years, I haven't driven one in 3. There are lots of reasons for this, many having to do with my medical condition, but I still regularly go to the store and get 2-3 weeks of groceries in one go. I just have a cooler attached to a 2 wheeled hand truck for fridge/freeze stuff and I can tie the bags on the 2-wheeler itself so I can easily walk to the store. Treesh can walk to work in 15 minutes or so from where we live, etc. So had some of this not been forced on me, the gas prices probably would have driven me to do it anyway. I know 2 years ago when I started doing this, I got funny looks, now I get lots of comments about what a clever way it is to save on gas costs and I saw someone else with a set-up like mine the other day.Cool stuff. One question if I may, Treesh the lurker is your wife? Never knew that.
Anyway, you cannot compare countries so easily. Right Brazil has done a good thing, but let's not forget hat Brazil is destroying forest at a rate of a few times an area like the Netherlands per year....and these things are all connected.
The corn or sugar cane to fuel routes. The biggest innovation now is to make fuel out of organic waste. Many groups around the world are working on it and there will be some great advances in the near future. This way if you would use corn you could use the whole plant, but generally you would be able to use even wood.
The energy problem being a global problem is not completely true...some countries will have more problems. The most important factor will be space.....if you have space you can grow things and convert them in fuel. For a country like Holland things will become difficult.....and still a lot of skeptics are complaining about increasing solar and wind energy....even though we have very little oil, and no uranium. When things are getting bad, we should not expect other countries to give us their fuel....they want to get paid for it....and a lot as well.
edited typing and spelling errors