Conservation of Energy

[Hobbit]

But the rise in food prices has nothing to do with a shortage of energy. Food prices go up because there just isn't enough food being grown because there isn't the infrastructure in place to support the sudden spike in demand. The reason fuel from food is unrealistic is because the amount of acreage needed to grow that much corn would just be too burdensome. But you could grow it all, assuming you found a place to plant all of it.

All of the arable land in the country converted to ethanol would only fuel 20% of our cars, and it is a lack of energy. There's only so much arable land gathering energy from the sun. It can be used to make food or it can be used to make substandard fuel that actually does more harm to the environment than good. There's only so much of that land to go around, and when huge swaths of it are consumed by some hair-brained fuel scheme, there's trouble.

Hybrid cars do nothing for the environment?

When you calculate the cost of manufacturing and the environmental impact of the batteries, you have to drive the damn thing for about 3-5 years before the gas you saved puts you on the same environmental level as a Hummer.

Measures like what? Small cars and small engines?

Lighter materials, for one. The Saturn cars my family has owe a lot of their fuel efficiency to the fact that the body panels are plastic. Right now, they're phasing that out, because they're hard to make, but they're still looking for lightweight materials. The engineering on the engines is also improving, with the way fuel is mixed and such, a better engine can give you all kinds of mileage boost.

I was never arguing whether Saturn was rockin' right now or not (although GM is rumored to be shopping them around). Just that their success was not necessarily the result of genius long-term business strategy.

It was a gamble GM took that paid off. That's what business is all about. Maybe they didn't see this huge, long-term thing that we can look back on in retrospect, but what they did see was a potential market for safe, inexpensive, fuel-efficient cars. The company doesn't have to be in the business for the purpose of decreasing emissions to succeed at just that. That's the beauty of the market.