> What I'd love to see is petroleum-based fuels (and other fossil fuels
> to a similar degree) going out of use. Run power stations off biomass
> (burn plants) and run cars off biodiesel (processed vegetable oil).

Alas, I don't think "used" vegetable oil scales nearly well enough, and
then you quickly run into "oh, so you think we should use land that 
could
raise food for the hungry people in the world and use it to feed 
american's
hunger for big cars instead?" sort of argument.

I saw someone claim (on piclist a long time ago?) that if you calculate
the delivered efficiency of biomass (So much solar flux per km^2 yields
so much energy in sugar, alcohol, or carbon), there is no way you can
even support the worlds current appetite for energy, much less projected
energy demand.  IIRC, I didn't buy all their assumptions, but it's a
sobering thought; one doesn't think of plant efficiency compared to
solar cell efficiency (for example), but the number is there somewhere
and apparently it's not all that impressive :-(

BillW
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