By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The Middle East is a region where car is king and fuel is cheap, often leaving little incentive to find more environmentally-friendly ways of moving around.
But this year, as protests across the Middle East have pushed up the price of oil, the issue of finding alternative sources of fuel has come into sharp focus.
In a region that has one of the highest carbon footprints in the world, one business is taking advantage of the growing pressure to find alternatives to oil. It's set up the Middle East's first scheme to recycle cooking oil into biodiesel. It's proving profitable too, already their client-list contains McDonald's.
One can but wonder as to whether those Arab oil nations that are headed the way of alternative energy and biofuels know something that they – or at least our governments – are not telling us.
That, namely, oil is coming to an end and especially here plentiful and thus cheap and easily affordable oil, and, according to some studies, in 2010 we used 40pecent more oil around the world than which was produced globally. Now somewhere along the lines this does not compute and means that (strategic) reserves have been brought into use.
It is being estimate that in 2011 probably 50 to 60 percent more oil will be needed than will be produced. Things are, certainly, getting tight, it would seem and thus it is time we all looked for alternatives.
However, not alternatives to keep on driving our cars – it will simply not work – but alternatives to our transportation in all. The motorcar, whether with the ICE or as EV, will not play a role in that transportation future for the masses at all and we better all get used to that.
© 2011
