Oh n0s, what will the Arabs do now! /gasp

[SolveEtCoagula]

400 horses, 100% ethanol

This Saab concept car is one of a new breed of environmentally friendly high-performance autos.

___________________
Watch the video:

http://www.yahoo.com/

It is the featured front page story.

I mean seriously...lol What the fuck are they gonna do when we quit buying their oil? They have no innovations I can think of or natural land resources to replace oil. Oil and sand is pretty much all they have; maybe their sand makes good concrete?

Now I know replacing what a car runs on isn't replacing the worlds entire need for oil, but its a huge amount of their revenue...We still have factories etc. but I imagine in about 20 years or so even that will start to phase out because it will be far cheaper and it will boom our farming economy. Although I would expect that kind of make over to take 30+ years at the minimum in the States and far longer in other countries especially India and China because they are just now starting to build what we have had for 50+ years.

[SharkieJones]

The countries that have sold oil are so rich that it' doesn't matter if we stop buying now. They've already saved up to last them for 100's of years.

[mindovermycelia]

corn ethanol cannot possibly replace oil
I read that at the most, with corn production at the max, we might be able to satisfy about 10% of our fuel needs with corn.
But they are less than 10 years away from being able to produce ethanol efficiently from anything at all just about - even sewage. That will be awesome, just like back to the future!

[Bromius]

There are a lot of changes that could be made to reduce our energy use. I think the paradigm for the future will be finding ways to organize our industrial processes so that the wastes from one will provide an input for the next. In essence this would be creating a synthetic ecosystem. Lately I've been dumbfounded by the amount of stuff I throw away. With some will and ingenuity I think it would be possible to arrive at a day when you put only two recyling bins on the curb. One would be synthetic recyclables like plastic, glass, metal etc and the other would be organic, such as food scraps, pet litter, paper, old clothing etc that could be used to make either methane or ethanol with the by-product being used as a semi-organic soil amendment, which in turn could help us produce more corn or whatever for ethanol or remediate soil erosion. This would take some rethinking of what we produce, but it could be done.