[geeks] electric cars

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 @ 21:36 +0100, Mike Meredith said:

> On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:37:45 -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > Oil has quite a bit of production after it is pumped from the ground,
> > so I can't agree that it has no cost of production.  Then when you add
> > the cost of refining, you definitely cannot say it has no cost of
> 
> It should have been fairly obvious what I meant. Crude oil production
> essentially relies on an infinitely large oil field, which obviously
> doesn't work long term. Bio-fuels not only have the 'cost of retrieval'
> (processing the biomass into something usable) in the same way that
> crude oil does, but also has a cost to producing the biomass in the
> first place.

It's not obvious because you aren't making sense.

Yes, there is a cost to producing biomass, but likewise there is a cost
in pumping oil out of the ground, and sometimes that cost is very, very
high.

Are you certain that growing biomass will cost more?

> > > It might be worth distorting the market by slowly raising petrol
> > > prices to encourage the use of bio-fuels.
> > 
> > Yes, let's screw the market up even more than it already is by messing
> > with something that doesn't need messing with.
> 
> The market doesn't work. There isn't anything better, but a totally
> unregulated ('undistorted') market leads to things we've long since
> decided were unacceptable ... slavery, unrestrained pollution, etc.
> History is full of extremely nasty examples of what happens when you let
> the market run free.

Likewise, a totally regulated market doesn't work, and we are doing that
in several areas and it is a screwed up mess.

You have to consider too that eventually, the market *WILL* compensate
for your tampering, and sometimes the correction has been pretty nasty.

If you don't have to mess with it, then it is better to leave it alone.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Well, I have entered the "metallic years." 
Silver in my hair, gold in my teeth, lead in my ass... -- Sheldon Hall in
the rescue list]