>>>>>Starting with the cars we drive. (Pet peeve alert <g>). The U.S. is responsible for a waaay disproportionate % of the world's greenhouse gases and part of the reason is the cars we choose. Even a gas price surge like we had recently only slows us down, it doesn't change our ways. Too many of us still want to sally forth in Hummers, F-whatever trucks that would fill both lanes on most European roads, and SUV behemoths. There are way too many sub-15 mpg vehicles on the road.
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>>>>And now with the hybrids - I don't see them making anything smaller than they used to. The movement is towards larger hybrids. I expected to see an Echo hybrid, or something likewise smaller, but what did we get? Hybrid SUVs, 4wd tanks which still weigh two tons.
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>>>>>If I were elected President -- yeah, like that's going to happen -- my first challenge to the nation would be to come up with an affordable alternative to gasoline and/or oil. We did the Manhattan Project. We put a man on the moon. Why can't we do this?
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>>>>No viable business plan, which would lock consumers into services in the long run. If we sell everybody solar panels, they'd become independent from us. What would we charge them every month? Same with local windmills - no, we'll build huge windmill farms, so we'll have a center which would produce and we'd sell power, not domestic power plants, and we'd control the distribution.
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>>>>If everyone had an electric car, the unimaginable would happen: the big oil would lose its power, and we can't allow that, comrades, can we?
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>>>I just don't get this electric car business. Surely one of the problems of global warming is the polution caused by electricity production; that's why there's popular pressure to build wind and wave farms, solar panels, roof windmills, etc. So if elec is used to power the cars, presumably they're plugged in in the garage overnight, or whatever. Where does this magic elec come from? Surely that's just shoving the polution from the roads to the air around the elec generating stations, increasing their output.
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>>>When it comes to hydrogen-driven cars, I don't know, but strikes me there's a lot of energy used in manufacturing H2?
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>>Interesting piece in the news the other day about solar furnace power stations. They could supply a huge amount of energy at little environmental cost. Based in desert areas. Not so good for the UK as we have little desert. Apart from Luton
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><g> If only we could obtain energy from all our cultural deserts. Yes I read something a week or 2 ago about them. I can't remember how the energy would be transported from those areas to thoise that need it though. Once staying in an hotel in Egypt it struck me as so unfair that they used simple roof-top water tanks, heated by the sun, to supply the hot water for showers etc. - but in a place where you want a cool shower anyway! Alah moves in mysterious ways.

The article I read talked about needing to build a continuous power transmission grid not using alternating current (I'm no techie so I didn't follow why that was more efficient) but for a (relatively) small investment compared to fusion power enough power for Europe could be produced by covering a relitively small area of desert. For us the problem would be that would still leave us in the power of relatively unstable areas.