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

this is all so funny for us pedestrians

i tell you, being epileptic and unable to obtain a licence has its upsides

low bills

less moaning about how crowded the streets r

being a guerrilla pedestrian to annoy the gridlocked apes that toot their way through life

having a good laugh about the fuel strike

the only thing i would like the car for is a drive out to the country now and again

i guess thats a good pro

I love cars but I'm not a lazy driver; if I need to pop down to the local Co-Op for bread, I'll walk the half a mile. I also enjoy a good walk and I hope that the fuel strike will encourage others to rediscover their feet.

You shouldn't laugh too much though; our economy relies heavily on the black stuff. For example, food prices are high enough as it is - imagine if we had a proper fuel crisis on our hands!

there would be a lot more jobs though!

How do you figure that out?

Through a complete misunderstanding of how the economy works maybe?

No you'd need more people to move stuff about cos of the lack of fuel

also investment in renewable energy transport development would do that to

Ask yourself:

How many bicycle rickshaws does it take to deliver a sack of potatoes to the chip shop?

Now apply that to bakeries and bread

we'd have more money to spend no?

4got 2 say

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No. Think of the higher costs to any business transporting stuff. They don't use cars/vans etc cos they hate pedestrians and bicycles, they use them cos they're cheaper. Lots of businesses would find that increased transport costs would make them unprofitable, so they'd close.

Bicycle rickshaws? Are you serious?

Fair enough, you do make a point about renewable energy for transport. Fact is, this is doable now but there's too much money and politics involved in oil. I'm all for more LPG/hydrogen/biofuel but I've accepted that won't happen for a long time yet.

REALLY?

TELL ME MORE

Renewable fuels for transport isn't really all that simple. It's *doable* now but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good move to simply replace oil with something else en mass.

Oil is going to run out fairly soon and that, along with the issue of climate change, means there's a flurry of people looking for something to replace it with. The luddite idea that we can simply abandon our current lifestyles and transport is both nonsense and dangerous: our civilisation and economy is built on our transport capabilities and we need them to keep it going. The problem is the "newer" and supposedly greener alternatives have their own problems.

A good example is biofuels. These have been widely touted as a solution to climate change to the extent that several governments (including the UK's) are starting to make them partly-compulsory and yet already there is strong scientific evidence that they might create more problems than they create.

Hydrogen is another: it's relatively clean (certainly compared to oil) and extremely plentiful but how easy and cheap is it to convert a car to hydrogen? Arnold Schwarzenegger famously has a "green" Humvee run on hydrogen but he's extremely wealthy. Chances are the average car owner couldn't afford any such thing: any replacement for oil needs to be reasonably cost-effective.

>than they create.

I meant "than they solve", obviously.

This place needs an edit function (as I seem to point out fairly regularly).

One thing I've always wondered about hydrogen power is, given that its exhaust is water (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2), will it mean cities are twice as warm as they'd be anyway with all the extra water vapour in the air? We all know how much warmer it feels when it's really humid. Just a thought..

Does the water run-off from using hydrogen as a fuel actually become water vapour, though, or does it become liquid water that drips to the ground or could be collected and disposed of without entering the atmosphere?

Dunno.

Maybe it would vary according to the weather. Los Angeles might turn into Miami with all the H2O exhaust fumes. I can see most of it evaporating there, making the climate distinctly unpleasant. Whereas in Scotland, there'd just be puddles everybloodywhere. Maybe.

I need SEx.

We used to have an old icecream man who came down our way and instead of a big ol' gas hungry ford tranny he had this Lamby scooter-trike-thing with a freezer built on to the front of it.

you must be able to cool the exhaust in some way?

Yeah, you could, either air cooling or water cooling, but all that's really gonna do is leave pools of water on the road, making them wet and therefore less grippy and so that would be dangerous for them as are driving along

I've often wondered about the water emissions myself...we need a skientist and fast!

Apparently the reason why the price of corn has gone up so much is because it's now mostly being grown for the biofuel market

could you cool the water and put it into a tank you emptied somewhere?

is that feasible?

it would be great to see that!