I'm feeling guilty over this...

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Now I'm thinking about getting one of those electric Nissan Leaf cars when they come out in a couple of months.
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ever thought about riding on a 747 that was battery opperated?


while you are at it, you might as well throw everything in your possession that is made of plastic, rubber, pvc, ink, paint, and a host of other petroleum products.

matter of fact, if it's not glass or wood (unpainted), you can throw it.



fricking hippies.
they will never get it.

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Toke the words right out of my mouth. Anyone that post anything on the internet that says oil is evil etc etc. is a hypocrite. What they are saying is that they use oil too but they are green and you are evil because you use more than them. Leaf is not green. Nothing is green. It uses electricity and you can't use anything electric unless you are ok with using fossil fuels. Wire coating is made from petroleum.

Ad-hom paired with anger. What the OP says about the cost of oil production, and by proxy, oil intensive lifestyles, is true.

Actually the OP sounds nothing like a hippy to me. Hippies don't typically own 4wd, 4 wheelers, boats, and campers. At least in my experience. Sounds more like a Republican. I didn't read any mention of weed, patchouli, the Grateful Dead, or organic vegetables.

Or his post could be sarcasm intended to illicit angry reactions. Who the hell knows?


LINK

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Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can.

This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost.

After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."

2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"

3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."

4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and

5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold."

Some people don't survive, some do; the difference in outcome turns out to have precious little to do with skill or training, and everything to do with motivation—the desire to survive no matter how much pain and discomfort that involves—and the mental flexibility to adjust one's mental map on the fly to fit the new reality, and to reach stage 5 quickly. Those who go on attempting to operate based on an outdated mental map tend to die in utter bewilderment.

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Petrobras is surely the leader in deepwater production. Hence why Chouest is building boats here and everyone else we know has Brazilian oufits also.

If I remember my numbers right, I think about 60% of the fuel used in Brazil is from ethanol and it's growing everyday- we currently produce 550,000,000 million tons of cane here and it will grow to 800,000,000 tons in the next years. This is all w/o getting anywhere near the Amazon- there are laws against growing cane in those areas.

Brazil is largely a tropical rainforest and can grow sugar cane like crazy. The thought of using our food to fuel our cars in the US has never seemed like a viable idea to me. We have over 100 years of known natural gas reserves here in the US. If anything, we should be using that source more.

I live in Georgia. Peanut farmers here stand to make a lot of money if we used more biodiesel, for example.

It's not an either/or as several posters have implied on this thread. We DO need to CUT BACK on our oil consumptions, and not just for environmental reasons. We're giving a lot of money to dictatorships in this hemisphere (Venezuela) and elsewhere (the Middle East) because of our oil obsession here. The "drill baby, drill" crowd ignored the risks involved with drilling in our backyard. Sure, stronger regulation would have prevented this current spill, but the drill baby drill crowd are also opposed to regulating the oil industry. As it stands, the people who have been regulating the industry for the last couple of decades have been people FROM the industry. In other words, the inmates were running the asylum (kind of like Wall Street...). That's a recipe for disaster.

The OP has a great point about electric cars or using hybrids. Our major cities should also invest more in mass transit infrastructure development, particularly light rail (which uses electric power). But most importantly, WE AS AMERICANS NEED TO SHIFT OUR THINKING. Particularly in the South, people love their cars and trucks and shite. Take the train to work. Carpool. Try to live in a walking community or closer to the office. Fight against urban sprawl instead of embracing it. shite, do this for no reason other than to avoid sitting in traffic for an hour and a half each morning and afternoon. Your quality of life will improve, and you won't be funding dictators and terrorists to the extent that you are now. Energy independence is both a national security issue and a quality of life issue. We should all be behind it, regardless of party affiliation. Quit all the partisan bullshite and look at it objectively.

Which is better for you and everyone around you, burning more or burning less fossil fuels?

Which is better for you personally, spending more money per month on fuel costs or less?

Heck, ignore the rest of this post and just answer those two questions honestly. Let's drop all the partisan and reactionary nonsense and focus on the issues at hand. Using less oil is beneficial to us as a society, both now and for future generations. Let's work together on that instead finding ways to attack each other.

In a global economy, we all have a bit of blame to bear, true. But the bulk of it goes to the criminally negligent regulatory commissions and the criminally negligent corporate entity at the heart of this.

I live in a building here in the Warehouse District where at least 50% of the vehicles parked in the garage are large SUV's... I mean LARGE. It's pretty ridiculous, really... this is not a family building (kids need play space) and these people, mostly wives returning from Rouse's, take forever to maneuver their rolling land barges into tight parking spaces.

You know we have an excessive consumption problem when people can't even abandon ostentatious vehicles inside the city where it makes much more sense to have SmartCar-type transportation.

If our public transportation system was anything but dismal then maybe more people would be encouraged to drive less.

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but to say plastics must be petroleum based isn't accurate.

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Nobody said it had to be... it just is!