Breaking the Oil Habit.

No one will be happier than I when we finally turn our backs on oil. I enjoyed reading the linked article, but are the actions being taken by Sweden applicable to the United States?

1. The article lauds Sweden producing electricity by burning wood instead of hydrocarbons, but it does not mention the difference in CO2 emissions. My gut level guess is that burning wood would be even worse than burning coal.

2. The article states that Sweden is replacing gasoline with ethanol produced from grain, and more ideally from cellulose (straw, bark etc), but that the use of cellulose would require large areas of currently uncultivated land. If our more environmentally sensitive friends go ballistic at the thought of producing oil from a tiny percentage of the land in Alaska, how would they react to hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the lower 48 were put into cultivation for fuel?

3. The article also doesn't address the difference in population between Sweden and the U.S. There are a lot of things you can do that have a big effect when you have a small poulation (geothermal power in Iceland, for instance) that would be a barely measurable drop in the bucket when your population is 300 million, and growing by several million a year.

Not mentioned in the article were nuclear power or photo-voltaic power. I don't expect to see a new nuclear plant built in the U.S. in my lifetime. As for photo-voltaic, my wife and I planned on installing a system on our roof in Arizona. Unfortunately, our electric utility refuses to credit excess production during daylight against electricity used at night, so the economics got shot down in bloody flames.

So let's see. We can't drill in Alaska, or offshore Washington, Oregon or Florida. Windmills are an eyesore so we can't have those in many places. Can't have nuclear either. And my utility won't let me have photovoltaic. I guess we'll just keep on importing from our OPEC friends, until the rest of the world figures out the Dollar is really a worthless piece of paper. Things will get interesting then.

Surely the clever Swedes do not plan to burn wood in stoves. They are converting wood chips into liquid fuel. They are determined to stop importing Saudi oil in the near future.

If only more politicians around the world had the guts to do something about our love affair with gasoline.

Detano - I agree with you that we should be taking positive action instead of just talking.

We got our first "wake-up-call" about energy in the early 70's. Since then, all we've done is fiddle while Rome burns. Some time in the not too distant future we are going to pay the price for this.

It's up to law makers to lower the pollution standards and force car manufacturers to build smaller engines.
That has not happened to often here.

In Europe the price of gas has resulted in small cars. Europeans get from A to B in the same time and pollute much less.

...will this break the oil habit ?...

a/t 'business week - may 15 issue' , 'fast-ad' , a company producing gas station pricing signs , has benn receiving a small but growing number of orders for for the number "4" .
it seems that some gas-stations want to be ready when the price per gallon reaches "4" dollars .
anyone want to fill up a 'hummer' ?

a/t 'newsweek - june 19 issue' , arnold is getting ready for his second run at being governor of california by being the 'big mean green machine' !
(newsweek : he's put the hummers in storage...
he's told friends he was deeply impressed by al gore's global warming movie , 'an inconvinient truth' ...
in 2006 he is making the environment a centerpiece of his re-election campaign...)

go , arnold , go !
it'll be interesting to watch from the 'sidelines' .
hbg