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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (301106)	8/23/2006 2:05:53 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578938

re: Explain to me how we're going to become "energy independent" in 10-15 years if we consume 25% of the world's oil production. Remember we produce ~40% of the oil we use.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (301106)	8/23/2006 8:11:19 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578938

Sure, Ten. I'll explain it to you. We use 20 million barrels of oil per day. The US produces 5 million. Therefore, we need to reduce our consumption by 75%. The majority of all the oil we use goes into our cars. Cars get an average of 25 mpg. If we can boost that to 100 mpg, then we would only use about 5 million barrels of oil per day. If we build cars that are flex-fuel, so they can use E85 (85% ethanol) instead of pure gas, and make them plug-in hybrids, so that they don't need to use much E85 in the first place, then we'd have cars that could get 100 mpg of gas. Last piece of the puzzle: our installed base of cars. Cars have an average life of 10 years, so within 10-15 years, most cars would have been sold for new ones anyway. So time will take care of that. But just to be extra sure, our gov't could give large incentives to buyers of the new energy efficient cars and start charging very large tax penalties for people who are still driving the old cars after 2016. We could do this. The technology exists. We just need leadership. Don't believe it can be done? Brazil did it. We can do it too.