[Greg McCoy]

Here's an interesting statistic from my AP Environmental Science textbook, for what it's worth:

"Improving fuel efficiency is a much faster, cheaper, cleaner, and more secure way to save far more oil. For example, refining the projected peak oil output from ANWR would provide enough gasoline to run only 2% of American cars and light trucks-an amount that could be supplied much more quickly and cheaply from improving the fuel efficiency of these vehicles by only 0.4 miles per gallon. In addition, requiring new SUVs and light trucks used in the United States to have the same average fuel efficiency as new cars would save more oil in 10 years than would ever be produced from the ANWR."

(G. Tyler Miller, Living in the Environment, 13th edition, p. 360)

I'm not really a big environmentalist (My family has a 1998 Chevrolet Tahoe that doesn't do so hot on the fuel mileage), but taking this class has made me much more aware of some of these problems. I highly recommend taking it, if it's available at your school. Developing machines that run on better fuels more efficiently and output nearly no emmissions sounds like an exciting engineering challenge to me, and I'd love to be a part of it. Just some interesting thoughts...

<off-topic>I thought this was interesting too, although totally unrelated: "The total cost of the (Chernobyl) accient will reach at least $358 billion, many times more than the value of all the nuclear electricity ever generated in the former Soviet Union."</off-topic>