Sadly, the most cited reason for using a car on intracity trips is fear of other cars. Since we are not going to rebuild our infrastructure to allow people to walk and cycle without fear of being plowed by some inattentive selfish person in a two-ton wheelchair, each time someone puts their car on the road someone else becomes too scared to go without their car. This vicious cycle is unlikely to break prior to $20/gallon fuels. Thus, even converting to used vegetable oil still makes your car part of the problem, not part of the solution. To make matters worse, most of my friends who have converted use it as an excuse to drive even more (they think they are engaging in a no-impact activity, so they feel no guilt).

What are you going to recommend next, conversions to coal/woodchip burning cars? (Yes, this is doable. In fact, it was done extensively during WWII.) Face it, the act of driving a car is a demonstration of a selfish desire to be lazy even if it costs billions of people their lives and risks extinction of all we hold dear.

Let's just surrender; not the election, let's surrender the Civil War. Let's just kick the South out of the Union and improve our nation and the quality of our Presidents in one fell swoop. We will still have an immigration problem, but it will be white kids trying to get to a less racist and less oppressive place who will be sneaking across the Mason-Dixon line. I wonder how long the South will last once they lose all those subsidies from the 'immoral' coasties?

It's been a while since I lived in the South. That said, I remember rigidly segregated small cities (black side, white side, other side) and racial slurs as a speech norm by university employees. When I first arrived, I wondered why all of the black folks scowled at me. After I observed the state of race relations (in the '90s), I understood why my white face was viewed with suspicion. I really cannot imagine white southerners voting for a black man. Obama will have negative coattails in the southern flyover states.

I remember these same arguments back in the late '70s when women's studies departments were just getting started. I was at a campus of the University of California when a woman was discouraged from applying for a faculty slot by the chairman of the biochemistry department because, "We already have a woman in our department." Five years later (in the '80s), this woman was nearly denied tenure because she "is married and has children." Never mind that the man who said this was also married and had children. In the '90s, this outstanding scientist and community servant was denied a deanship, basically because the male applicant had lost his grant funding and thus had nothing else he could do.

I just wonder how many more women's careers have been and are being scraped along these same shoals of sexism. If we want to understand how many women are having their ability to contribute to society undercut by sexism and how to prevent it, it seems logical to have women's studies departments.

"As the price of gasoline falls, will Americans start driving again? "

When did they stop? The small (4% year-on-year monthly) drop we saw earlier in '08 disappeared and were probably explained more by a change in vehicle choice than by any significant reduction in miles driven.

I hope Americans love their country and the planet it is on more than they love cruising around in their fossil-fool powered wheelchairs to buy plastic crap from China, but so far I don't see any evidence to give me, or the biosphere, much hope. If only type II diabetes wouldn't take so long to claim its sedentary victims.

Even RMN didn't try to gut environmental legislation. These war criminals have sunk to new lows.

In order for America's credibility to be on trial, America must first have some. Sadly, since we allowed the Bush Crime family to usurp the Presidency, we are no longer a member of the civilized world.

This all assumes that Europe must continue to use as much energy in the near future as it has in the near past. Considering the need to reduce global green-house gas emissions by 80-90% over the next fifteen or so years (if we want to avoid the worst of the "tipping points"), a 25% cutback on non-oil energy consumption in the EU would seem to be a good start.

Now, if only Americans will respond to their wars by giving up unnecessary driving, we may just leave our kids a world that can be lived on.

My vehicle runs on at least three different fuels: carbohydrate, fat or protein. Of course, it does involve a little flexing on my part.

Oh come on, broken chains? I have broken exactly one chain in nearly 400,000 miles of cycling. Of course, one can always carry a chain tool if one has that scouting mentality (I carry one whenever I am leaving town).

And the realtors are so unfit that they can only cover one neighborhood per day? Check back in a few years when they have worked their CARcinogen-laden flab off.

On the up side, maybe some of the real-estate and development corporations will stop standing in the way of reasonable and safe roadways for bikes if they see a profit angle.