h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Petrol (or gasoline) is a limited resource. It will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million years for the earth to brew up another batch of crude. It is controlled largely by people who commit terrorist acts and oppress women. And if the Texans aren't bad enough, the rest is controlled by Arabs. The citizens of these countries are so disgustingly rich that no citizen ever works. All work is performed by imported labor from nearby Pakistan, India, and the like. They like to band together and curse Western Capitalist Pigs in their spare time, and also commit terrorist acts and oppress women. Since their spare time is, well, all the time, they make quite a nuisance of themselves.

So, I'd like to see a few things actually being produced that enterprising people have already invented:

The 100mpg Carburetor
The car that runs on alcohol
Anything else that OPEC has managed to purchase the patent on

Maybe if they lost their income from fossil fuels, they'd have to try their hand at farming corn in the desert. After a hard day of tilling rock and sand in the oppressive heat, maybe they'll be too tired to go, say, invade Kuwait, or throw stones at Israeli tanks.

Don't forget the vegetarian car. http://www.veggievan.org/ Runs on vegetable oil. Absolutely brilliant? We'll see.

If we need to drive cars at all, then let it be a shit-car, or, less offensive: a bio-gas car. With still so many people starving to death, we can't really afford powering up our automotion with veggies.

I've said this elsewhere (vegetarianism forum), but I'll give the short form here for your benefit. World hunger has nothing to do with food shortage. The problem is in the distribution. Most places that are starving are doing so because their governments are using hunger as a weapon to control the people. So free countries feed their animals like kings, but tyrannical ones starve. Free ones try to help out, but that extra food cannot be distributed without the cooperation of the local government, who then steals most of it outright, then redirects the rest to people who don't need it. African starvation is the most widely reported kind, but this comes from the area of the world that is richest in natural resources. They could farm the hell out of the Serengeti if they could be left alone by maurading bands of Tutsi's long enough.

Well, whatever the reason, the problem remains the same. How can we be blabbering about different kinds of fuel, if we don't even seem to care about solving that 'distribution-of-food-supplies' problem first?

Because you must agree that the little efforts we are collectively making to help those in need, can hardly be called sufficient.

Believe me, I do agree that we need to find alternative ways to fuel our transportation devices, if we wish to avoid distroying this planet and its atmosphere. But let's be humane first!

The process for converting vegetable oil to usable diesel is very simple; the problem is that in many countries you are then required to pay tax on it before you can use it, which makes it unprofitable.

I have knocked together an article on bio-diesel at http://www.h2g2.com/A276743