pg318

Europe's not been 'dealing with' gas prices, it's been intentionally created by energy taxation that has caused the change in vehicle types, and pushed the development of smaller, lighter, and much more efficient vehicles. My mother's gas-engined car in England can get nearly 50mpg, I had a Citroen diesel (bigger than the HHR) when I lived there that got 48mpg. It wasn't slow either.
Painful as it may be, that's probably the only way that things will change here. Otherwise we'll all be needing boats to get around after the polar icecaps have melted. Then there'll still be people who insist that they need their twin-engined Hummer-cruiser...

Lone Ranger

My wife's car is a 2005 Volkswagen Beetle 1.9 liter turbo-diesel 5-speed manual that gets 42mpg city, and about 50 on the road... so I highly agree with you! And with 177lb-ft of torque @ 2000 rpm it has good pull. Little slow off the line in 1st but from 2nd gear on it pulls very well indeed.

wingfeather

Keep in mind that Europe is a totally different beast.

Different city layouts, different driving behaviors, highways, etc...

Add the thousands of pounds of American crash safety paraphernalia & that little diesel tincan will go even slower than in the UK.

We'd also have to re-train all U.S. drivers to drive better, to try & keep their city cars in the city, off the interstates if they can help it and on high speed roads to "keep to the right" so the Ferraris & Porsches can get by :)

Lone Ranger

Our Mexican made German engineered little diesel tin can feels a lot more substantial than the Nissan Sentra, and Toyota Corolla tin cans we also test drove. As matter of fact, its just as solid a package as our HHR. It's a keeper!

P.S. Anyone who knocks diesels hasn't driven the newer state of the art modern diesels. Honda and Toyota both have small diesels in development for the North American market, should be interesting.

kornellred

Drive whatever you want. The best thing to do is try and convince your children to get sterilized.

'cause there ain't no solutions to our problems. Period.

Of course....Life itself has quite a different take on the situation.......

wingfeather

Agreed.

I remember researching the scientists who discovered the genetic helix... their concern for the future was - OVERPOPULATION. Listen to them

tahenke

Alright, now you have gone and struck a nerve! Don't bring global warming into this because it justa ain't so! Didn't this planet already go through an ice age? Hmmmmm? Were all the cavemen driving hummers too? I think not! Global warming is a natural occurance and has nothing to do with cars!!! Whew, thats my rant As far as the oil goes it's more touchy than just make fuel efficient cars. There are countries whos economy's are supported by oil. If you stop buying oil then you kill those countries economy's. Then they try to survive and how how do they do that? They go to war! We can't have that so we need to ween ourselves off the oil slowly. If we can't ween ourselves off slowly then we go to war. But not with any OPEC nations. Anylists predict we will go to war with China (the second largest consumers of the worlds oil) and I'm sure that wont be pretty. I honestly don't know what the answer is but I lean towards electrical and even nuclear energy.

pg318

In geological timescales there are many natural mechanisms that change carbon dioxide concentrations, and this planet has been much warmer, and cooler than it is at present, but that doesn't mean that we'd like it. We weren't around for much of that time.
The CO2 levels fell throughout the Carboniferous era, when all the oil and coal that we're currently using were created, storing a lot of the carbon underground, and the era ended with one of the more significant ice ages. What's happening now is that much of that carbon is being released on a couple of hundred years - a geological blink of the eye. Yes, these cycles occur naturally, but we're causing a step change in the curve.
The point of biofuels as a renewable energy source is that they should take out as much carbon from the atmosphere to grow them as they release when they're burned, making them carbon neutral so long as the land usage is not displacing other carbon-absorbing activity. Forests are a significant short-term stabilizing factor for CO2, as warmer, CO2 rich conditions result in forestification (nod to GWB) of less verdant areas...or at least that would be the case were the planet not covered in humans.
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Ca...s_climate.html

tahenke

Humans are kind of like a virus! lol