Oil

So you say. Running around, seeing the entire world, drinking exotic
beer, bedding exotic women… it’s fun, for a time. It is, in the end, empty
and inconsequential. Being truely in love and raising a child is the single
most fantastic aspect of life. More time to enjoy the things in life that are
really important.

I had fun in college, but it got old. Real quick. While my friends were
still having fun after college, living in $hitty apartments with big incomes
and little responsibilities, I was getting married, buying a house and
planning a family. Now, I’m a few years “ahead” in the family thing, and
they’re gettign sick of being close to 30, in a $hitty apartment, with no
real fulfillment in their lives.

I couldn’t wait to graduate, get married, settle down and have kids.

It’s priorities. Lots of our friends have lived together for years, knowing
they were going to get married. they just spent all their extra income on
big trips all over, “enjoying life”. They didn’t understand that settleing
down and starting a family was how we enjoyed life.

I suspect that has a lot to do with why many Americans don’t travel that
much. It seems to me that many more people here are homebodies, and
are perfectly happy at or near home, and less so when they’re away.

Europeans take a lot mor elong vacations, whereas we take many small
ones. 3 day weekends, weekend trips, etc. My wife and I have only
gone on 2 or 3 week long vacations in the past 5 years. We get away at
least every month or so. 4 days in the mountains, a weekend at Myrtle
Beach, a BBQ at a friend’s house a few hours away, a few days hunting
in the woods, camping at the lake. there’s enough nearby, in driving
distance, to make big trips less important. Probably a contributing
factor as to why we drive so much.

thank you for the essay no one asked for 😮

So you say. Running around, seeing the entire world, drinking exotic
beer, bedding exotic women… it’s fun, for a time. It is, in the end, empty
and inconsequential. Being truely in love and raising a child is the single
most fantastic aspect of life. More time to enjoy the things in life that are
really important.

I had fun in college, but it got old. Real quick. While my friends were
still having fun after college, living in $hitty apartments with big incomes
and little responsibilities, I was getting married, buying a house and
planning a family. Now, I’m a few years “ahead” in the family thing, and
they’re gettign sick of being close to 30, in a $hitty apartment, with no
real fulfillment in their lives.

I couldn’t wait to graduate, get married, settle down and have kids.

It’s priorities. Lots of our friends have lived together for years, knowing
they were going to get married. they just spent all their extra income on
big trips all over, “enjoying life”. They didn’t understand that settleing
down and starting a family was how we enjoyed life.

I suspect that has a lot to do with why many Americans don’t travel that
much. It seems to me that many more people here are homebodies, and
are perfectly happy at or near home, and less so when they’re away.

Europeans take a lot mor elong vacations, whereas we take many small
ones. 3 day weekends, weekend trips, etc. My wife and I have only
gone on 2 or 3 week long vacations in the past 5 years. We get away at
least every month or so. 4 days in the mountains, a weekend at Myrtle
Beach, a BBQ at a friend’s house a few hours away, a few days hunting
in the woods, camping at the lake. there’s enough nearby, in driving
distance, to make big trips less important. Probably a contributing
factor as to why we drive so much.

There’s enough nearby to hold my interests most of the time. I don’t like
traveling as much as I enjoy being home with my family. We’ve got
enough property to keep ourselves occupied. I’ts good to get out and
travel, but it’s better to be home.

you poor man, threw away your bachelorhood like that 🙁

Exactly :diablo: I run two tractors on used chipshop oil , I run it through 3 sets of filters in a gravityfed rig . The tractors have a small petrol tank (1 gallon ) so I fire them up using petrol and when they are warm switch over to oil – using it in diesel cars is a bit trickier , you need to preheat the fuel usually by winding the feed pipe round one of the cars water pipes that comes out of the radiator . Oh and a bloody good set of glow plugs.
And it definately smells of chips when running .

Al

I BET YOU READY FOR YOUR TEA AFTER A LONG DAY BEHIND THAT SMELL. :p
The man from the ministry doesnt need to know 😉 just because we use our initiative.

o
not nesseserily it can be done through filters and runs as good as diesel. 😀 😀 😀 😀

Exactly :diablo: I run two tractors on used chipshop oil , I run it through 3 sets of filters in a gravityfed rig . The tractors have a small petrol tank (1 gallon ) so I fire them up using petrol and when they are warm switch over to oil – using it in diesel cars is a bit trickier , you need to preheat the fuel usually by winding the feed pipe round one of the cars water pipes that comes out of the radiator . Oh and a bloody good set of glow plugs.
And it definately smells of chips when running .

Al

damn, what the heck are you doing all your life. Even I have been more places than you in the US, including what many call “the freak states”. at the moment just had a 22 ounce steak, and saw a humvee earlier. Around here, lots of people with big asses ……….. that should really be a me no tap big ass.
>>>>>>>>>>>>

There’s enough nearby to hold my interests most of the time. I don’t like
traveling as much as I enjoy being home with my family. We’ve got
enough property to keep ourselves occupied. I’ts good to get out and
travel, but it’s better to be home.

Kyoto will accomplish nothing worthwhile. It will lower emissions by
such a trivial amount, at the cost of trillions of dollars to taxpayers. It will
accomplish such a tiny amount, at such a huge cost. Maybe if
developing nations were required to take part, it’d be worth discussing.

There is no proof that increasing CO2 emissions increases temperature
globally. It certainly DOES increase temperatures locally – anyone living
in a city knopws how much hotter it gets in a city due to the greenhouse
affect.

Massive, sweeping, global treaties that only affect some people, and are
nearly impossible to enfore will not work. Kyoto is a nice gesture, but
it’s a fart in the wind. Want to improve things globally? Do it on a local
level. That’s the only way to do it.

Want to improve water quality in a big river? If you try to limit dumping
and runoff in the river, you are not going to accomplish anything
worthwhile. If you enforce dumping and stormwater runoff on a local
level, for the tens of thousands of tiny tributaries that lead into the big
river, you’ll see a marked improvement in just a few years.

Same goes for air quality. Individual cities can enforce their own
regulations better than a federal government, and infinitly better than any
global treaty. Establish emissions standards in a state, then county, and
then on a city level. A city can have very strict standards. Maybe
penalties for high emission vehicles, bans on polluting power plants.
Smog levels will drop, air quality will improve, and the greenhouse effect
will lessen. If all cities with pollution problems do the same, it’ll work.

There is absolutly no way for Kyoto to “work”.

I am an environmental scientist, I’ve studied under some very well
renowned ecologists and proponents of global warming. I have come to
the conclusion that GLOBALLY, we have made and are not making any
significant impact in temperatures. Locally, as in citys and metropolitan
areas, we are having significant impacts. In some European cities, for
example, temperatures have risen nearly 2 degrees Celcius over just a
few years! In Raleigh, NC, temperatures have risen a little over the past
decades. Just outside of Raleigh, they’ve actually dropped.

Global warming isn’t provable, it’s something you need a good degree of
faith to believe. So much of the predictions are based on computer
models.

Regardless of GLOBAL warming, anyone can see areas of local, even
regional climate changes. Cut down enough trees, and you’ll see some
big changes. Mt. Kilamanjaro, for example. The caldera is visible for
the first time in like 12,000 years. Due to global warming….only the
temperature is well below freezing. What’s happened is that so much of
the surrounding rain forest has been clear cut, that there is insignificant
moisture evaporating into the air – it’s cold enough, it’s just stopped
snowing enough! Madagasgar’s turning into a desert, the rivers are
eroding all the soil out to sea. They’ve got to develop and they need
trees, but they’re not doing it in a sustainable way. The local climate is
being altered by human activity.

Measures need to be implemented that work on a smaller scale, at a
local level. They will be far more effecient and much more productive
than Kyoto oculd ever be. By fixing the local problems, the overall
picture will improve. Furthermore, people will never see a direct benifit
form Kyoto. If things are done localy, people will actually see concrete,
definite improvements within a short period of time. This makes it easier
to enforce, since people won’t think they’re being screwed by the
governemnt as badly as if it were a global, sweeping, “thing”.

I do not believe that we are causing global warming. We are causing
local climate changes, and that’s provable. Work on finxing them, and if
we are causing global warming (which cannot be proven), then that’ll fix
the problem better than any kyoto-type reform could ever hope to do.
Regardless, we should strive for cleaner air and water, more effecient
cars,a nd better energy sources.

I have faith that if or when we begin to run low on fossil fuels, we will
have a viable, and preferable alternative already in use. The only thing
preventing electric vehicles from being practical is battery technology. I
was reading an article today about modified hybrid cars. for $12,000,
you can get your hybrid car modified to get over 200 miles per gallon.
They simply replace the NiMH batteries with Lithium ion batteries. It
works! But, it’s SO damned expensive. For city living, electric cars are
totally practical with current technology. Gasoline is very dangerous,
volitile, and crude technology. Think about it, we have these high tech,
microprocessors driven pieces of technology, and we get them to go by
drilling a hole in the ground and burning the stuff that comes out – how
CRUDE.

I think we’ll have a solution to the problem before we have the problem
(of post peak-oil).

I say invest in fusion, and for now, fission plants. Nothing is more
effecient and clean, or environemtnally sound. Supposed “Green” power
sources are far more hazardous to the environment, wind plants kill birds
and take up land, solar takes up tremendous acreage. The best use for
them is on an individual basis – put wind and solar generators on existing
structures. The ONLY drawback to nuclear is the waste. Another
problem I don’t think will exist. We’ll have to store it for a while, of
course. I amcertain that when we start to run out of space (100 years or
so), we’ll have a perfectly safe and reliable method of launching it into the
sun.
We NEED power, and we need it an an exponentially increasing rate.
I’d rather have MY pollution stowed up in a nuclear waste facility than
emitted into the air. Nuclear has the potential to be very bad, should
things go very wrong. All other practical powerplants ARE bad, and no
matter how clean and efficient they get, they still burn fossil fuel, and can
never hope to be as clean and efficient as nuclear can be.
If energy is abundant and cheap, electric power becomes much more
feasable.

[QUOTE=BuffPuff]

Looking in to refining old cooking oil from the local takeaways.Only draw back i can see is the car smelling like chicken biryani.

From what I gather, the main problem with the above solution is that you’ll still have to pay the current rate of fuel tax on top of the cheap cooking oil. I guess this would apply even if you could run your vehicle on cheap cola or water…..

Surly to god you don’t think I’m going to tell the nice chap from the ministry do you, hell have to sniff me out first and on a Saturday night in any large town every were smells like biryani.

o

Need a massive refinery :rolleyes: :rolleyes: Anna 😀 😀 Anna 😀

not nesseserily it can be done through filters and runs as good as diesel. 😀 😀 😀 😀

High Oil Prices are here to stay

Oil prices will stay high now that India, China and other emerging economies are growing, and expecting a “western” lifestyle – i.e. access to cars etc.

More demand on a limited resource = higher prices.

I believe that US won’t sign up to Kyoto because they truly see themselves as “beyond” such matters :diablo: as witnessed by my (albeit limited) first hand experience of dirt cheap oil/fuel prices and gas guzzling cars when over there. Unfortunatley, US is all too insular – try watching their “global news” programs and you will find very little mention of anything outside North America unless it directly impacts on US in some way :dev2: !

Until, and unless, they realise they too are citizens of the “global village” they will continue to act as they please, including consuming huge amounts of fuel. Sure they may have large distances to travel, but that does not stop people using economical vehicles rather than huge SUVs.

No doubt US will try to restrict the consumption of fuels in Middle East (e.g India) and Far East (e.g. China)as their economies boom, yet they will also defend the right of the USA to burn as much fuel as they choose :rolleyes: .

Either way, demand for oil is growing, and prices will never be as low as they were a year or two back – let’s face it, we’re all burning a limited resource.

Don’t ask me how we solve the problem :confused: , imposing limits on the emerging economies seems a little unfair, unless we in the developed world (esp. USA) too are prepared to limit our own use of oil – and if government taxes on fuel are the only way to limit consumption, then so be it.

Global warming used to be a “what if..” scenario, I think few people/nations with any common sense would now argue that it is not happening, all there is to argue about now is how fast it’s happening, and whether mankind has actually gone so far that global warming has become a self sustaining, and out of our control 🙁 .

Paul F

There was an interesting thread on General Aviation about fuel prices and differences. ( Here: http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=41481 )

It’s easy and simplistic to blame someone else, the Americans being prime targets.

You could pick on the British for using a remarkable amount of petrol for such a small island. But a working public transport and rail freight system would be required to help that problem – you know, like much of Europe has. 😉

It’s going to be interesting to see who recovers first when the fossil fuels run out.

Australia is, by some measure, larger than the USA, with a population roughly the size of California. I see more LPG cars here (there’s a licence / number plate badge which IDs them) and in the cities, public transport works. If that isn’t enough, Canada provides an alternative model as well. But all three countries have a car culture. Only the US has segrigation of transport by race – Viz California.

Gas guzzlers like SUVs and urban 4WDs are the obvious and pointless example of the problem. But electric power (on fossil fuel power stations) and plastics are a much more insidious consumer.

We are going to be living in interesting times. Let’s see humanity’s stunning abilities with a chronic rather than acute problem. Will the last person please… Oh, it’s gone out already. 😀

$2.68 here — 😡

>>>>>

Have you ever seen a globe? This place is BIG! I’m 27, and I’ve never been west of Tennesee.

Don’t be fooled by what you see on TV. You see ads for 1 pound
burgers, and 22 ounce steaks, 44 ounce drinks and Humvees. Rap
videos showing people loaded with gold and HUGE a$$es.

My wife watches too much reality TV on MTV. If I were a terrorist,
and I saw MTV, and thought it were representative of the US, I’d hate
us too.

damn, what the heck are you doing all your life. Even I have been more places than you in the US, including what many call “the freak states”. at the moment just had a 22 ounce steak, and saw a humvee earlier. Around here, lots of people with big asses 😀 ……….. that should really be a 🙁 me no tap big ass.

pluto77189
I appreciate many of the points you’ve made and I did say I was generalising…

I am not necessarily swayed by what I see on TV but I work with US citizens day in day out and see their huge vehicles and talk to them about the cost of oil etc.
However my boss here drives a mini-van that holds about twice as much fuel than my car and cannot even match or come close to the mileage of a tank of fuel taht I can manage in my car. But he wishes it was more economical and admits wouldn’t be able to drive it if it was on our economy.

The government have a big part to pay here too in the cost we pay at the pump (approx 75% IIRC) but it doesn’t lessen the effect of it going up.

I have to travel 15 miles each way to work too. I want to see my kids 240 mile round trip, parents 200 mile round trip (I combine both in one trip virtually every time.)

I try to drive responsibly and usually get on average 39-40 mpg out of my car. Although not everyone does drive responsibly and there are a number of people who drive big “gas guzzlers” over here – often on short runs to school or town, so the UK are not saints either.

If the US is so proactive & “green” why not sign up to the Kyoto agreement? – I believe the US are the only ones not to.

[QUOTE]Looking in to refining old cooking oil from the local takeaways.Only draw back i can see is the car smelling like chicken biryani.

From what I gather, the main problem with the above solution is that you’ll still have to pay the current rate of fuel tax on top of the cheap cooking oil. I guess this would apply even if you could run your vehicle on cheap cola or water…..

It’s just how Americans are.. they like their things big. Big Cars, big burgers, big malls, big warehouse stores, big breasted women, big men, hollywood controlled by people with big noses, and the rap industry controlled by people who like big butts

>>>>>

Have you ever seen a globe? This place is BIG! I’m 27, and I’ve never been west of Tennesee.

Don’t be fooled by what you see on TV. You see ads for 1 pound
burgers, and 22 ounce steaks, 44 ounce drinks and Humvees. Rap
videos showing people loaded with gold and HUGE a$$es.

My wife watches too much reality TV on MTV. If I were a terrorist,
and I saw MTV, and thought it were representative of the US, I’d hate
us too.

We’re killing the planet? Our conventional power plants are cleaner than
most other countries, and we’re much less urban than othe rcountries.
The US has more forests and trees than it did a hundred years ago, and
despite the sprawl of cities, they are growing.

We’ve got a lot of space, therefore we need a lot of cars. I commute 20
miles to work, 20 miles to my second job, and 40 miles back home – at
least 3 times a week. If I go visit my parents, it’s an 80 miles round trip.
I see them all the time.

Who the hell wants to live in a city? Not me.

We consume more oil out of necessity. Wheather we’re driving SUV’s
or prius’s, it doesnt’ matter, the size of this country means were going to
commute more. It’s not possible to have a mass transit system like you
do in Europe, so we HAVE to drive, or we remain isolated. Comparing
American driving habits to European ones is comparing apples to
oranges.

I’ve got my eye on that Toyota highlander hybrid that’s coming out next
year – lots of power, 4WD, and 30 mpg – cool.

The Americans are also at fault with their hugely un-economic vehicles and their attitude of as long as they are ok (in mainland US) then the rest of the world can go whistle

It’s just how Americans are.. they like their things big. Big Cars, big burgers, big malls, big warehouse stores, big breasted women, big men, hollywood controlled by people with big noses, and the rap industry controlled by people who like big butts.

The Americans are also at fault with their hugely un-economic vehicles and their attitude of as long as they are ok (in mainland US) then the rest of the world can go whistle. When will they wake up and realise they are killing the planet as much as everyone else if not moreso and do something about it?

I appreciate I have generalised some of the above but it’s how I feel.

I’d love it if I could fill up here at work it is only about 60cents a litre (note spelling please people of America!).

Fuel around here varies from 89.9 – 95.9+ for unleaded.

I even admit I considered buying one of those scooter things that does 100mpg for getting back & forth to work!

Looking in to refining old cooking oil from the local takeaways.Only draw back i can see is the car smelling like chicken biryani.

Need a massive refinery :rolleyes: :rolleyes: Anna 😀 😀 Anna 😀