Want to really stick it to the oil companies?

[garybeck]

Want to stick it to the oil companies? Drive on vegetable oil instead!
Diesels offer advantages over hybrids

8.1.06
Gary Beckwith

With today's high gas prices, people are waiting in line to buy hybrid vehicles - cars that have an electric motor to assist the gas engine, which makes for better gas mileage. Some do it to save money, some to save the earth from global warming. Either way, demand for the hybrids is strong and increasing.

But for those who really want to drive an environmental car and save a few bucks too, the better choice is to get a diesel. You can burn biodiesel, now available in most cities. Biodiesel is refined vegetable oil that comes from American farmlands and has a lot of environmental benefits. And if you really want to go for it, you can tweek your diesel car to run on "SVO" (Straight Vegetable Oil) without much effort. I know this because I've been driving my 1985 Mercedes on used vegetable oil collected from restaurants for several months now, while some people are still waiting for their Hybrids to arrive. And just recently the 35ft long, 12 ton Solar Bus was adapted to run on pure, sweet smelling vegetable oil. If a big bus can do it, you can too.



The advantages of diesels over hybrids are many:

Emissions: A hybrid car will get slightly better gas mileage than an diesel car. But diesel cars, if running on SVO or biodiesel, are burning a product that comes from plants, which absorbed CO2 while they were growing. And get this - the plants that grew to produce a given gallon of SVO actually absorbed more CO2 than is emitted from your car while you drive. So when the life cycle of CO2 is considered, you are actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere as you go!

rest of article:
http://www.solarbus.org/articles/060801-diesels.shtml