If the electric car can really be commercially viable now, i dont see any reason why the auto industry is holding themselves back. The competition in this area is stiff, especially from Japanese, Korean, and now Chinese manufacturer. I pressume the Republican does not have much sway over what the Chinese manufacturers can or can not do.

If electric car is commercially viable, it is just be a matter of time. I suppose, with increasing energy costs, it will increasingly be more viable.

^_^v

Over time… it will change (once it economically makes sense to use the more environmentally friendly energies). Never underestimate the power of connected global citizens. No political, superpower propaganda can resist that. *_^

>> World Economy belongs to the rich and some lucky fellas..
Hahaha.. we have debated it before.

Much more enviromentally friendly energy sources have existed for awhile now.

Electric and Solar. The technologies have existed.
Why didn’t they go boom?

I think : “The Status Quo: Oil & Gas”
Electric cars (they are limited in production currently, you can guess why) would struck down all the Oil Companies and Countries. Do you realize how big they are?

Those economic powers are just too big, too fat, too bad, and too risky to be left out. How many people would get unemployed? How much $$ need to be reallocated?
What kind of political disorder this would cause?

World Economy belongs to the rich and some lucky fellas.. ^_^

- There was a study to calculate the cost (to the environment) to process corns (the main ingredients of ethanol) to ethanol. The result was surprising. If I’m not wrong, the total cost to the environment is almost the same or more than the fossil fuel

- By processing corns to ethanol, there’s a shortage of supply of corns for consumption. Thus, the price of corns is rising which hurts the end customers

So, in my opinion, there’s still much to do to replace fossil fuel to ethanol. One of the examples is how to improve the process of producing ethanol from raw materials without hurting the earth too much.

What about hydrogen? Hydrogen + oxygen = water ^_^. But I’m not sure the process of extracting hydrogen.

I think, earth won’t fail to feed us. One thing about human which fascinates is that, our body is the result of optimisation for millions of years. Maybe when one day the earth fails to feed us, there will be a new organism which is going to dominate the earth, replacing Homo Sapiens. Or we evolute to a new form .

And if it’s caused by nuclear war, as far as I know, the species which has better resistance to radiation than human is: COCKROACH. It’s time to imagine how cockroach will dominate the earth, or we evolute into a cockroach-like creature =P.

I will try to discuss further on my next topic.

One thing I like about Hardono’s comment regarding using ethanol as fuel. It is a very ingenious engineering solution to current limited amount of fossil fuel. Hopefully it will gain popularity worldwide soon enough.

I think the Sun is relatively renewable resource. One industry that affected by the Sun is definitely the farming industry. I’ve read news that in Brazil they are now using ethanol as the fuel. So it might be the answer of the statement in your last paragraph.

What do we define econonomic activity anyway? As we commonly defined, I think it is just a measure of dollar value added to any human activities. The world economy depends pretty much on how much we value things.

The physical mass and energy combined is, as we understand it now, of course constant. But physical mass and energy on earth may not be constant, considering the showering of energies from the sun and other sources.

So is the world economy constant after taking into account the raw materials consumed? I think it’s not. It depends on how we value things.

But I do agree that the bigger the world economy, the more it tends to consume raw materials. But it does not necessarily true for the future. Population may decline. Lifestyles may change. People may value the environment much more highly in the future than we do now. In that scenario, the world’s economy may still be growing without the necessity for increased raw materials consumptions.

Only when the economy can be driven completely only by renewable resources in the earth, then we can be confident that the economy has the power to keep growing?