Quote:..""Or are they just going to tow the 'green' line like all the other misguided, gullible, ignorant, arrogant, narrow minded, short sighted, interfering hippy lunatics? ""
No, they will have been proved right by events by then and petrolheads will be left with nothing better to do than argue whether the Subaru Imprezza or Mitsubishi Evo was the better car as they curse their plug-in hybrid BMWs and wish they'd bought a fuel-cell Honda with auxiliary solar power.
The thing is, environmentalists and petrolheads can argue all they like about global warming, carbon footprints, biofuels etc. But that's all a red herring, since oil is running out and can only get more and more and more expensive over the long term.
Edited by Sofa Spud on 13/10/2008 at 22:17
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Isn't there more oil still in the ground than we've had out of it?
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'course there is! The scare-mongers and panic-merchants have been saying that the oil is about to run out since the 1930s!
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Quote:...""Isn't there more oil still in the ground than we've had out of it?""
Even if that's the case, we've been using oil in significant quantities for less than 100 years, at an ever incresing rate. That demand is set to keep growing because of the rapid development of the Indian and Chinese economies. So even if we've only used half the extractable known oil reseves, we' might only have a few decade's worth left.
The situation with North Sea gas should be a wake-up call - we've used most of that up in about 30 years.
One hopeful area for oil reserves is the South Atlantic around the Falklands. Serious prospecting has been going on there for years but one problem is the sea is very deep - up to 2 kms in some parts, which is 'uncharted waters' as far as the offshore oil industry is concerned.
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I heard there were serious opportunities around Ascension Islands as well.
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Maybe, but nothing can alter the fact that oil is a finite resource. It will become apparrent that supplies are running short long before we actually run out.
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We're not even at peak oil yet! Anyways, should it run out soon, the technology exists to supplant the internal combustion engine via fuel cells (hydrogen power)!!
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Maybe but nothing can alter the fact that oil is a finite resource. It will become apparrent that supplies are running short long before we actually run out.
I'm confident that another fuel/energy source will be found before the current fuels run out.
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I'm confident that another fuel/energy source will be found before the current fuels run out.
so true snail, necessity is a mother
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>...as stupid as the current lot to thieve billions out of the motorist and not invest it back.
Yeah, right - in keeping with the ancient principle that tax revenues should be spent only on the group they were raised from. Just as alcohol duty is to be spent entirely on pub maintenance.
Governments need money to function. Their source of money is tax, which can be levied, broadly, on people's earnings and spendings. Vehicles and the fuel that goes into them are one of those spendings, so we pay tax on them. But by paying them, we're not contributing some grand National Motoring Endowment Fund, or entitling ourselves to some kind of special treatment from the government, any more than a corporate fat cat is entitled to more NHS treatment because he's paid more income tax than you or me.
And who is this mythical creature 'the motorist' anyway? There are roughly as many cars in this country as there are people of the appropriate age to drive them, which means that a voter, to a first approximation, is a car owner. It's utterly fatuous to present them as some persecuted minority, unjustly penalized with disproportionate taxes for their antisocial but atypical ways.
As for the deterrent principle of car-specific taxes, a person may be blinkered enough to disbelieve the evidence that global warming is being caused largely by CO 2 emissions from human activities. (One such is running for a responsible office in another part of the world.) Or a person may take the more defensible view that what happens in this country is insignificant in the global context. But even so, that's to pretend that fuel is the only problem. If the entire UK vehicle fleet were replaced tomorrow with perfectly clean vehicles that produced no emissions at all, there still wouldn't be room for them all to drive or park at the same time. It's not just the emissions - the vehicles themselves are a problem, and until someone can invent a better or fairer way of encouraging owners to be selective in their use, taxation is all we've got. And the Tories won't make a scrap of difference to that.
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Good stuff WdB, hard-headed.
One way to address this is through public transport, because to a lot of people owning a car is a burden and driving it a persecution. If public transport were even half as convenient as cars, and reasonably cheap, many motorists would happily get rid of their cars (as well-heeled Londoners often do because they can use taxis). But politicians have been swayed by vehicle, oil and road interests to neglect or 'deregulate', puke, public transport. And local authorities like Livingstone's London have been resisted by those interests and in frustration - or just because they are like that - sabotaged the roads and screwed the car owner.
The tories in general won't be any use on public transport, probably. The London mayor is a special case who may mean well and is smart, but I am afraid he too will be badly advised. And he's a cyclist.
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Good point. Lud, about public transport and the vested interests that have worked against it. Ian Hislop's film the other night about the Beeching report was enlightening: I hadn't known that Ernest Marples, the Transport Secretary who appointed Beeching, came from the roadbuilding trade and was only too pleased to give Beeching a brief that yielded anti-railway answers.
Margaret Thatcher hated buses and regarded travelling on one as a sign of personal failure, so she was equally pleased to treat them as a plaything for private businesses to make money out of those who had no choice but to use them.
And then John Major (yes, the jolly one who makes a comfy living now out of being Sound On Cricket and Not As Loathed As Mrs T) and Cecil Parkinson combined to finish what Marples and Beeching started by fragmenting the railway, not to make it run better but to prevent a future Labour government from re-assembling it.
So, Tories likely to make travelling life better for the British public? I wouldn't bet on it.
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Ernest Marples the Transport Secretary who appointed Beeching came from the roadbuilding trade
Marples, Ridgeway, Keir, Christiani and Nielsen, later shortened to Marples Ridgeway. I often wonder what happened to the three partners with foreign names. Three weak points in the underpinnings of a flyover perhaps, along with assorted Kray and Richardson gang members.
Edited by Lud on 14/10/2008 at 15:51
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