Cars take up plenty of space and resources but do nothing most of the time and most cars run on a fuel which is under some other country's control and about to become much less available so everyone in rich countries will need to change their transport expectations soon, probably to something like The Netherlands or The Far East where cheap two wheel transport has always ruled.
The important thing here is that energy costs change: with new technologies, renewable energy is always getting cheaper: for example, photovoltaic cells have dropped from USD 200 to below USD 2.50 per peak Watt at retail ( already below $1 per peak Watt to manufacture) and are still getting cheaper whilst petroleum is getting more expensive, and would be more so if Carbon Dioxide pollution was taxed too. My latest electricity bill from ENECO (January 2009) shows I am paying 0.2385 Euros per KWh because of Netherlands taxes. According to SolarBuzz, that is more than the industrial wholesale price of even solar electricity today and many times the 0.03 British Pounds per KWh of recent British wholesale windpower. Windpower is always cheaper because it is not consistent even if it is predictable.
Geothermal energy keeps getting cheaper and solar thermal too. Nuclear power from Thorium seems like a great idea which no one investigated because it does not make nuclear bombs as a byproduct which is actually the reason most countries got into nuclear power from Uranium.
The elephant in the corner that no one normally talks about but featured in the sharpest rising graph in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth movie is human population size. I support Camfed as my favourite charity because it educates women in Africa which is noble and directly positive for humanitarian reasons but indirectly too because education of women lowers fecundity across all cultures and countries.
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