On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 02:08:24PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > On 02/26/07 13:55, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 09:36:51PM -0800, Freddy Freeloader wrote: > >> Paul Johnson wrote: > >>> Michael Pobega wrote: > >>> > [snip] > > I wonder what burning a gallon of gas really costs? (I don't know, I > > found a couple websites that suggest the true costs is somethinglike > > $5-6/galloon, but they were out of date and from likely biased > > sources). > > Whatever the cost, it's irrelevant. > > It's an *excellent* source of transportable energy, and most of it's > secondary costs will either exist with other forms of burning liquid > fuel, or be transferred to different sources.
Agreed, somewhat, but I think its relevant to a discussion fo the costs of gasoline. Gasoline's costs are artificially low when you look at the deferred or external costs. Some other technologies *may* not necesarily have as high deferred or external costs making their initial higher costs not so bad. Its a matter of perception. Some recent reading I'm doing (Our Angry Earth -- Asimov and Pournelle?) talks about using renewable bio-fuels instead of fossil fuels. Part of the argument is that renewable bio-fuels pull carbon, for example, out of the air in their production and put it back cyclically. This means that some of the external costs you see with fossil fuels aren't there with the renewable bio-fuels. So their logic is that even though these renewable bio-fuels are (were, written 1991 or so) more expensive at the pump, their total cost, including external factors, is lower. How valid all of that is, I don't know. A
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