Bly, What?? You think the enviromentalists and their concerns are driving the price of gas up?? In my opinion, it appears we have a situation caused by the greed of the
oil companies, non-restictive commodity speculation and cartels cutting back on production to get their piece of the pie. By all rights, in this day of dependence upon
oil based fuels,
oil should be considered a necessary resource barred from commodity speculation (as is water). Exxon, etc. would not be posting such enormous profits if there wasn't enormous markup. Going to E-85 and/or corn or switch blade grass fuels is economically and enviromentally a bigger disaster. Recently, CNN has been running a program about E-85 and other bio-fuels. The conclusion is the amount of coal based energy being used to produce coupled with the lower gas mileage from E-85 is actually a negative. The show points out that coal burning energy producing plants need to be replaced with cleaner fuel plants (i.e nuclear) and other sources of primary fuels for automobiles,etc. need to be found. Interestingly, Honda has a pilot program which will utilize natural gas (which we have plenty of without importing anything) as a base for the production of hydrogen. Supposedly, Honda has a generator that plugs into a 110 volt receptacle and converts enough hydrogen to power the car and produce energy to power the house. So, get rid of the commodity trading on oil; move toward alternative cleaner fuels; put a plug in the outflow of money into the middle east; decrease our dept to foreign financial entities. There will always be gasoline available but at least they won't have us by the b....s anymore. Just my two cents and thanks for the soap box.