That's what I'm wondering. Actually, the same weight difference riding in a diesel electric train should have some small effect on fuel consumption. Make that several thousand people who are 130lbs overweight riding the train twice a day, 5 days/week or millions of them driving their SUVs 15,000 miles/year and the fat has to be costing lots of extra energy. That alone has to be contributing to the higher prices, then there's the size factor, which makes many people buy SUVs simply because they can't fit into or climb out of an economy car.

One of them could be hot, the other can't. ;)

Another point of my cow magnets post is that we can expect to see a lot of gas mileage related myths, misinformation, scams, and cons coming our way.

Another example: that 100 MPG carburetor that Uncle Dave who was a tinkerer and lived in Iowa came up with in 1956. He demonstrated it to GM and they bought it and swore him to secrecy. They've been sitting on it ever since then, but the patents are running out and will revert to the family in 6 months. Unfortunately the family has fallen on hard times. A trusted friend has recommended that I contact you as an investor, blah blah blah.

More seriously, there have also been groups working on energy conservation for many years. Rocky Mountain Institute is one such group. I don't agree with all of their answers but there is a lot of food for thought on the web site.
http://www.rmi.org/

I'm willing to bet that millions of cars and trucks sitting at ill-timed or basically uncoordinated traffic lights consume more energy on a weekday than all the SUVs and sport trucks in the country. As urban sprawl overtakes us all, we encounter more and more traffic lights that are neither sensitive to traffic nor linked with the preceding and following lights along a main commuter route. Driving to/from your workplace in rush hours can often take twice as long as the same trip would in the wee hours of the morning. Almost all of that extra time is spent sitting still waiting for traffic, missing lights, sitting in toll lines, etc. Gasoline engines consume about 1/3 of the fuel idling as they do at moderate highway speeds (not true of diesels), but cities don't really participate in saving fuel by doing something serious about traffic control.

BTW: I'm not trying to pirate this thread, I'm just putting a perspective on it.

No doubt there are lots of simple things people could do to conserve energy. I brought up the obesity angle because it seems to me that looking for a magic fuel additive is like looking for a magic diet pill. Neither will work. Americans need to suck it up and make smart, hard choices in both areas.

Not to go too far on a tangent here, but it's basically all about human psychology. Looking for the easiest answer to a problem, rather than an effective one that requires work.

I'm an avid motorcyclist and often hear the question, "What can I do to make my bike faster?" The true and correct answer is to go take a race track riding course, and go practice, because a skillful rider on a moped will smoke a numbskull on a superbike. That's not what they want to hear; they're looking for magic parts to add horsepower, which is already far more than needed.

Americans need to suck it up and make smart, hard choices in both areas.

No arm-twisting is required as the price of fuel goes up. We're already seeing a decline in the sales of SUVs and a rise in the sale of hybrids.

A friend tells me that sales of large power boats have died as well. Another friend used to fill his boat's tanks for $350. Now, at least in Canada, that'd cost him nearly $1000. Yet another has a bus-sized RV with a V-10 gasoline engine in it and took his family of four on a 2500-mile vacation trip two months ago. Cost him $2000 (Cdn) for gas.

The real killer is that the cost of absolutely everything rises with fuel prices. Everything is moved in trucks; even the fuel itself.

I don't know about that. People may be begining to conserve, but it's too little and probably too late. I just got home from a mere twenty mile trip, and during almost all of the driving I couldn't see very far in front of me because of all the SUVs. I can't wait to see $5.00/gallon. If people are going to waste fuel, it should cost them.

I'm all for $5 fuel. Hopefully it will cut down on the number of people in my way as I pilot my diesel-guzzling full-size truck to work. Either way, a few bucks really isn't changing my lifestyle. The difference really isn't that much.

That's why this country is in the position it's in now. Too many people think that because they can afford it, it's ok to waste it. They don't take into consideration the law of supply and demand. Nothing we do can significantly increase supply, but demand is dramatically affected by the number of miles per gallon the average vehicle burns. Limited supply and unreasonably high demand equals high prices. I just don't understand why so many people can't see that.

To answer that question would require an answer that includes the politics involved in what we teach kids in school, and what media reports as economics facts. IE, it would kill the thread.

I understand the relationship, and I'm willing to pay the higher price to get what I want. PowerBooks cost more and are in shorter supply than Dells, but which do I own?

Guys, people don't naturally consider global consequences when they act, and I'll agree that's short-sighted. What they do pay attention to is what they can afford. Until recently, the price of petro was affordable to SUV owners, and SUVs were rather reasonably priced. As the price of petro goes up, less people will buy them. Even so, as Carlos notes, some people will still pay a higher price for fuel and SUVs to suit their tastes, and if they can afford it, so be it. That's the way it works out here in the USA, and most everywhere else that has a free market system.

Except for Europe, Asia, Africa, South America...
The US is the only place where half of all vehicles sold have been SUVs. I guess when you're as big as a house you feel a need to drive around in your living room.

cwtnospam, did you happen to note the point I made about the connection between the price of fuel and SUV sales? That would certainly be a detriment in Europse. People here also have more income than in Asia, African and South America.

If you're going to clip a sentence from one of my posts and react to it, at least take into consideration other points made . . . unless you're just trying to say something nasty about the U.S. :rolleyes:

- counting down to thread closure . . .

I'm trying to say that we cannot afford to continue based on the assumption that because we as Americans do something, it is automatically good, or good for us. There are a great many things that we can do, most of which we shouldn't.

We need to wake up to the reality that we can't drill our way out of the mess we're in, nor can we pull a magic pill or additive out of a hat. The "free" market can't help with this either, since the suppliers have no financial incentive to develop a replacement for something that works very well for them.

There is the free market theory that price will always correct for availability (or lack thereof). Therefore, if we actually did see that there is a finite amount of oil (so far there is only a theoretical limit, but we always find far more), then the price goes up to control usage.

Is there a problem with gold consumption? It's a self-correcting problem.

It is popular to blame people for "gross consumption" because they drive an SUV. I'll give you that most people don't NEED one. I don't NEED a full size truck all the time, but when I do, I do. Should I rent? That's not a good solution for me, so I bought one. I traded a guzzler for the one that gets the best fuel mileage possible in a truck, and I run renewable bio-based fuel in it.

One could argue the economic principles of capitalism apply here; those who want to earn nice things and want to be able to afford a big vehicle will work harder for it. That drives our economy and productivity. Note that all the largest vehicles are made by US companies, keeping some of the money in our economy. You could argue that buying small foreign cars is depleting our economy.

Not to argue the politics though! I'm just making the point that it's not just as simple as blaming people for gross consumption. That applies to some, but not to everyone, and there might be another side to it.

The past is an important influence on people's behavior. Up until around 1950 the US was a net exporter of oil. To a degree that abundance made the Packards, Duesenbergs, and Cords of the 1920s and 1930s possible. I'd say that people's perceptions of gas as abundant continued most of the way through the 1960s. As a society we didn't start to react to the fact that we use more oil than we produce until around 1970.

Gold isn't consumed. Even if you eat it, it will not be used up. Since people don't need it in their daily lives, it would be easy to correct any problems on the production side by simply not buying it. We can't do that with oil.

And for good reason. If you're getting less than 15mpg on average (not just highway) as most SUVs do, you're using more than twice as much gas as you would in a car getting over 30mpg. Since many people are complaining about the price of gas, and somewhere around half of them drive these gas guzzlers, I find the hypocrisy a bit much.

This would be true, except there are no US companies making cars. They're all multinational and many of the parts in so-called American cars don't get produced here. The flip side is that many Hondas and Toyotas for example are produced here, including many of their parts.

Maybe not, but it's a great place to start. Gross consumption doesn't just hurt us at the pumps. It hurts us politically around the world and that in turn hurts us militarily.

It seems there are already other energy alternatives in the wings . . . like ethanol, for example. There we even have a sustainable resource with a huge payoff to agri-business. See this link for an indication of just how much ethanol is produced in Kansas alone. Then there are methane hydrates, which are currently difficult to retrieve, but when the need arises, it's there -- for hundreds of years. I know it's not exactly PC, but there are also untapped oil fields in the Arctic. In the years ahead, I believe we'll see huge advances in solar energy technology, with solar panels helping to provide electricity for hybrid vehicles. Then there's also hydrogen fuel cells, which might not be that far off. All of these alternatives can work in current auto engine designs.

The earth's energy future doesn't seem too bleak, when you get right down to it. Maybe we won't have to use acetone after all. ;)

A 250 pound soccer mom could be hot... if she was about 8 feet tall. And then she might have a legitimate excuse for needing that huge vehicle.