Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’

[Ardesco]

What about good old nuclear? It's works well with submarines and feasibly could work well with planes (nuclear hydrogen jets). This technology could be easily transplanted into boats and freighters and bearing in mind that most nuclear plants in commission now days were built in the 50's and still haven't made the workers grow new body parts, nuclear really doesn't deserve most of the bad press it gets.

Why is it so hard to replace a lot of plastics with wood? Why is it hard to replace clothing using plastics with clothing using cotton?

Brazil seems to run it's cars pretty successfully on ethanol, so why is this not feasible for anybody else (The whole reason that happened was because they didn't want to have thier automotive industry reliant on oil coming from america)?
We currently use a lot of oil because it is an easy resource to purchase and can be used to create many different things, however we currently have alternatives that we can use if we so desire. The only difference is that we will have to use them if oil runs out.

[richard-af]

This is interesting by the way, just in case you weren't panicking already.

Thanks - I needed cheering up.

[richard-af]

What about good old nuclear? It's works well with submarines and feasibly could work well with planes (nuclear hydrogen jets). This technology could be easily transplanted into boats and freighters and bearing in mind that most nuclear plants in commission now days were built in the 50's and still haven't made the workers grow new body parts, nuclear really doesn't deserve most of the bad press it gets.

Why is it so hard to replace a lot of plastics with wood? Why is it hard to replace clothing using plastics with clothing using cotton?

Brazil seems to run it's cars pretty successfully on ethanol, so why is this not feasible for anybody else (The whole reason that happened was because they didn't want to have thier automotive industry reliant on oil coming from america)?
We currently use a lot of oil because it is an easy resource to purchase and can be used to create many different things, however we currently have alternatives that we can use if we so desire. The only difference is that we will have to use them if oil runs out.

Nuclear: Too pricey. The safety costs are astronomical. Oh, and it takes a lot of energy to actually get the stuff ready to use. Which means oil.

Ethanol:
Talking out of my botty here, but I imagine to satisfy the enormous demand for energy, there'd need to be more crops than can be grown.

Alternatives: No. To manaufacture viable alternatives, the creation of the necessary infrastructure would use up enormous quantities of... oil.