So does anyone know the latest news for alternative energy?

To replace oil, that is? No one is going to be able to survive with gas at 4 or 5 dollars a gallon. I'm all for electric cars, etc., but this is extremely urgent. Can you actually use corn oil in your tank? Things could become quite desperate, so how do we survive? What do we put in the tank for the time being, until they make gas tanks that will get much more miles per gallon, or allow mass production of electric or hybrid cars, or make them affordable! Motorcycles,bikes, good- but not realistic for so many. How do we get un-fucked?

:eyes:

They actually said that today.

Google is your friend... you tell us. ;)

Try Care 2 Connect... they have a lot of info

about energy issues, global warming and wildlife...

among other causes. ;)

Corn converted to ethanol can be added to fuel and already is to up to 10%.

We don't. We've been fucking Mama Earth too long too hard, not in the kind, loving and fertile way but the rapist way of the sicko controll-freak. Now Mama Earth is responding in kind.

"Sorry and thanks, Mama Earth."

I get the feeling that attitude would be a step in the right direction...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=115

Personally, I think electric cars are the most promising solution, but mass production is at least a couple of years off, probably more.

The current price for oil is partly due to speculation, but the speculation is there because of fears of supply. We're at the point where demand is outpacing supply. Not that there's no oil, but there is a finite and diminishing supply available, which will gradually get more expensive to extract. So I expect a dip in oil prices in the short term, but an increase long-term, to God-knows-what.

Good general advice: get to know your neighbors, plant a victory garden, economize and get out of debt, and contemplate ways to get off of oil.

the worst of this is still a decade or so off and we could get enough electric vehicles to replace our ICE vehicles and we would gear up with alot more nuclear power plants as an interim situation. We need to pour a lot more money into fusion research.

We need a Manhattan Project style level of investment into it. That was enough the first time around to get us nuclear power, we need something similar to get us Fusion power which would once again give us cheap abundant power to continue and improve our way of life without any nuclear waste or pollution. Then we would be riding good atleast for the foreseeable future. Hopefully people will be getting off this planet long before we start to run short of hydrogen a few millenia later.

couple of months if they really wanted to, they also could be made affordable and would get about a 100 - 200 miles on a charge, plenty for most urban folks.

surrender monkeys use those things.

Oh, and in case somebody gets all offended:
:sarcasm:

including used vegetable oil, like from restaurants. Actually, restaurants generally have to pay someone to dispose of their used vegetable oil, so you can often find some that will let you get it for free. You would have to have some kind of siphoning system though. Also, you have to be careful that they only use vegetable oil, not animal fat (lard) or liquid shortening. Peanut oil, corn oil, canola oil, etc. are all good for making biodiesel. Obviously you have to have a vehicle that runs on diesel to begin with.

You can also make ethanol for as little as $1 per gallon. You can get a fancy set up like this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080508/tc_nm/ethanol_homemade_dc

But you could also rig up just a standard still much more cheaply. You don't have to use grain as your biomass. Just plain old sugar will work, and you can get off spec sugar that can't be sold as food, but can be used to make ethanol.

SAN FRANCISCO — A few years ago, drums of used french fry grease were of interest only to a small network of underground biofuel brewers, who would use the slimy oil in their souped-up antique Mercedes-Benzes.

Now, restaurants from Berkeley, Calif., to Sedgwick, Kan., are reporting thefts of old cooking oil worth thousands of dollars by rustlers who are refining it into barrels of biofuel in backyard stills.

"It's like a war zone going on right now over grease," said David Levenson, who owns a grease hauling business in San Francisco's Mission District. "We're seeing more and more people stealing grease because it lets them stay away from the pump, but it's hurting our bottom line."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/5793314.html

we are always two missed meals away from barbarism which is why an energy crises that can potentially end our way of life is very dangerous to us all.

And that is all you will ever see from it.

www.teslamotors.com

http://www.zapworld.com/hybrids-plus-zap-PHEV
ZAP Launches Sale of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Car, Tests Show up to 120 Miles per Gallon:

http://www.golfcarliving.com/

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0399403.htm

http://www.electriccars.com/membership/index.cfm

employers out there will car owners making sure that oil prices come down or we
nationalize the oil industry --- and get ELECTRIC CARS on our roads ---

Lets subsidize both manufacture and purchase of electric cars!!!

They're so ugly!

Out with the combustion junk motor, in with batteries and electric engine. Now there's a street going lady!

This guy did it, using an auxiliary plastic tank for the alcohol in his trunk with a separate fuel line and patching it into his fuel line in the engine with a T valve that allows you to go back to regular gas in your regular tank when needed. He also modified his carburetor and advanced the timing. On fuel injected cars with computers, they sell computer chips to modify the engine to allow you to run on pure ethanol. They're driving pure ethanol cars in Brazil after all.

http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_drane.html

Make your own ethanol in your back yard making your own still and using sugar or mollasses you buy in bulk. Hopefully, some coops will emerge where regular people can pool their income together to buy large quantities of raw sugar at low prices. Supposedly, by making your own fuel from scratch, you can reduce the price to somewhere between $1 to $2 a gallon. There's an application you can make to the federal government to run your own small ethanol production plant in your backyard. It takes some daring and elbow grease but nothing comes easy.

http://www.ttb.gov/forms/f511074.pdf

Good mileage is only a factor if gas is expensive. Make your fuel cheaply and mileage becomes less important. However, there's always the danger that if this becomes popular, that speculators will move in and make sugar which is fairly cheap right now unaffordable.

standardizes the process of deriving energy for individual stuff. just like a house has a myriad of appliances, the best way was to standardize the means which they are powered: keep voltage same, plug same, etc.

where to generate energy? that's easy. start massive decentralized structure; create a web of shared energy. if one site goes down, let it draw from others. incorporate energy production from big facilities to home generation.

what to create energy? that's easy, too. whatever is best suited to the localized region: wind, solar, geothermal, coal, hydro, nuclear, sluiced manure, etc.

sharing, it's not just for kindergarten anymore.

as soon as the prices is driven up to where only the rich can afford it, and a good chunk of the rest of us die off in the malthusian crisis caused by the fact that our current way of life is no longer possible for most of us.

We need to start planning for the future individual or as communities because its unlikely that enough people in any "official" position of authority will do anything for us.

That doesn't help. The only thing the dufus in chief could come up with was some talk of switchgrass.

For the near term, people will drive less. Then when it costs more to get to work than you earn, well, that's when things will get interesting.