I think China is a fair way ahead of what they are given credit for, J20 certainly surprised a few on here 😉

ppp Your posts #4 and #5 are contradictary.

If as you state in #4 the extraction of fossil fuel oil gets prohibative the price paid for oil produced from other (agri) production methods will rise.

The question was not solely about the UK, reference your post #13.

Stating that UK production has to be subsidised and thus coming to the conclusion in your post #5 that all agri oil production is therefore uneconomical is not a sufficiently rigorous examination of the potential.

There may be many reasons why a subsidy is currently necessary in the UK. The relatively low cost of fossil oil at present quite likely to be one of them, if your statements in post #4 are accurate it is quite easy to envisage a situation where the cost / price equation is reversed.

As others have stated, the prices of food and water are going to rise along with the oil price due the increase in demand from developing countries, so its not as if biofuel prices are going to be static whilst oil goes up. Its quite possible the price of the related foods could rise faster than the price of oil.

I agree with the economic argument you gave, but saying that a finite ammount of anything will never run out is, I think, giving a false impression. Oil based fuels could certainly become prohibitively expensive, with all the global tension/instability that entails.

With Air Forces being major national organisations, they would be able to pay higher prices for a time, but a switch to synthetic coal derived fuel is what I think we will see in the medium term.

Biofuel is not a long term solution, it requires large amounts of fertiliser and pesticides, and it drives up food prices by reducing their supply.

Oh they will certainly become uneconomical to use as a fuel if they become that rare. When I say they won’t run out I mean we will never get to a point where there is effectively zero oil since there are large stocks of hard to access oil, such as oil sands. Here’s a quote from wikipedia:

“Many countries in the world have large deposits of oil sands, including the United States, Russia, and various countries in the Middle East. However, the world’s largest deposits occur in two countries: Canada and Venezuela, each of which have oil sand reserves approximately equal to the world’s total reserves of conventional crude oil.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

So there will always be oil, it just might not be available for burning in cars, planes ect 🙂

snafu352 seems more informed than either of you.
“http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123249376“]Air Force jets perform first flyover using alternative fuel

“http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=58202

The AMERICAN air force. I don’t know if you noticed, but I said “here” and in the top of my post it says “Location: England”…

Oil will not run out, this is a common misconception. The availability of oil is bell shape curve, and we are around the top, but will gradually start moving down the other side of the bell curve as the the cheap easy to get at oil starts running out and we have to go after the harder to reach stuff. As we do, the quantity available will fall, and because it will be harder to get to, and because demand is going to increase, the prices will rise massively, making oil reliant methods vastly more expensive. Even if demand stayed the same (which with the growth of China and India, it certainly will not), then the price would still go up due to the gradual increase in difficult in getting it out.

If we are going to spend loads of money bring an aircraft into service under UOR to take account of the pressure on the Tornado and Typhoon squadrons, would it not be better to take our Jaguar’s out of storage, give them a full service, and get them back in service? They had a good upgrade before they retired, and they are perfect for the role in Libya, zooming around in the sand with a couple of Paveway’s, and as an added bonus for the RAF, they do not need to put them on a carrier, and they could likely reassemble the pilots to fly them from the old hands flying their way to retirement, and use them as a cadre to re-train some of their Harrier pilots who would otherwise be on the scrapheap, while leaving the FAA in the cold :diablo:

What Jaguars in storage? There are none.

There a whole bunch at the RAF’s aerospace engineering college, but they are ground instructional airframes and I can’t see getting them a flight clearance being an easy task.

Bin Laden is irrelevant and has been for a very long time. He is just the guy blamed for 9/11, and A’stan long since stopped being about 9/11! Bin Laden being dead or alive has no link to the type of aircraft deployed.

They already backtracked on the Tornados I heard?

In which case, another backtrack isn’t out of the question.

The government will pay a big political price for it though!

According to an article from RIAN (some months ago), there were some talks between Russia and Argentina about the purchase of SAM systems.

Not any news furthermore. What a SAM system was discussed, if any?
Ideally a later S-300 model, but what about money?

What would Argentina even do with an S-300? They are not going to be taking on the Brits and they are not going to be attacking the Falklands. Argentina is focusing a lot on peacekeeping operations in its region, and that would certainly support their procurement of these transports. The transports are not for attacking the Falklands.