One of the topics I expect to spend some time on here is the future of the automobile.  I did an admittedly indefensible calc based on the time it took to get from walking to riding horses to the Benz Patent, making the weak logical leap that such technologies develop exponentially.

On that basis, we might expect some as-yet unimagined technology to become available by 2130.  Personally I am voting against the site-to-site transporter, ala Star Trek, since it is my belief that what those things really do is take you apart to see what you're made of and how, and assembles a perfect replica at the destination.  That person thinks he's you, but that's because all your neuropathways and memories have been duplicated perfectly, too.  That's what the Heizenberg compensators are for.  He's not.  You're dead.

But I digress.  If you come back here, you'll see that I do that a lot.  What I was getting at is that since the Earth may be making more fossil fuels, but probably at one one-hundred-millionth of the rate at which we are eating them, they will effectively run out one day.

Ethanol is a political boondoggle.  By the most optimistic etimates, no more than 7% of our domestic motor fuel needs could be supplied by corn-based ethanol.  Making that ethanol uses oil, so that's a pretty ineffective source once oil is so hard to get that it's priced out of the market.  Cellulosic ethanol, made from any plant waste from rice straw to tree bark, has a potential to supply maybe 21% of our fuel needs, and yes, it takes energy to make that, too.

As much as I enjoyed the Pimp My Ride show with Ahnold celebrating a hot-rodded Chevy Impala with an 800 hp turbo diesel powered  by biodiesel, that stuff is even scarcer, and most of the feedstock goes into making soap and heating oil.  Ditto waste kitchen oil.

Hydrogen mostly comes from natural gas, which will run out along with the oil.  It takes so much energy to break the hydrogen atom off a water molecule that the result is more an inefficient storage medium like a battery, than a fuel.  And almost all that energy comes from burning coal, the worst polluter in the fossil fuel arsenal.

This all means if we are to continue enjoying personal transportation cars, we need to get on with the business of building the infrastructure needed to make sure that the ones we have when the oil to make the gasoline and the coal to run the power plants to recharge our electric car's battery run out, have some other means of powering themselves.

Bottom line:  When we have built all the wind farms we can, tapped all the geothermal sources we can find, and dammed all the rivers the EPA will allow, what's left is solar.

Right now photovoltaics are 16% efficient.  Based on the three big arrays planned or under construction in California, it takes a square mile to make 8 peak megawatts, about enough for 21,000 households.

Those 8 megawatts cost about half a billion bucks.  At that rate, supplying 300 million households in the US would cost $6.5 trillion.   Maybe research can improve on that efficiency, but at that rate it would take solar arrays with an area equal to the combined territory of Connecticut and New Jersey to supply all US households.  Industry is another question.

Does anyone else have any problem asking the oil and coal companies, who are raking in record profits, to contribute some of that to a massive project to insure the maintenance of our lifestyle in a future without fossil fuel?