Fueling green feelings

From a capitalist standpoint, raising oil prices was a brilliant idea. So, why didn't the oil producing nations do it earlier? Then, Malaysia, as an exporter, stand to gain loads before we run out of oil (in, what - 2015?).

The picture painted here shows a more scary picture - that we apparently get to choose between saving the economy or saving our planet. Most nations are pushing green earth policies on the back burner as we try to cope with the global inflation.

The point is - why do we need sky-high fuel prices before we realise how dependent we are on it? And if we had faced this predicament earlier, would it have increased our urgency for developing alternative fuels?

In a recent debate on the increment of fuel prices locally, one of the speakers pointed out that Malaysia's oil reserves was supposed to have ran out in 2005, yet, thanks to intensive exploration, we now have an oil company that drills and operates in 33 countries.

Which is cool.

We must have spent billions on that.

Which is also cool. Because obviously, that was the immediate problem.

I wonder how much was spent on alternative fuel.

I know we have made ventures into that. Pak Lah has ensured that our palm oil and various agricultural output be researched as biofuel.

I particularly like the way some parties put it. Not. But they did think out of the box - they thought not of oil but electricity. Just think, one day, we might have a USB cable attached to our cars (or maybe not, but fascinating isn't it? :-)

And then, there's cars fueled by water! Well... hydrogen technically, but using electrolysis (electricity=renewable energy) to produce hydrogen from water - well that's just brilliant! They called it the hydrogen vehicle (that well, uses hydrogen fuel cells). The car, produced by General Motors was aptly called Sequel (As in Fossil Fuel was the prequel, eh?).

Then last year, a Japanese car manufacturer, Genepax, introduced the car that runs on water. Simply fill in the tank with water and waalaaa! The car runs using an internal generator that does the whole electrolysis thing. It was reported by Reuters, so that's pretty exciting. Imagine attaching a hose from the kitchen tap to the driveway!

But then again, if it's too good to be true... well, you know the saying.

So that brings us back to our rising petrol prices and where we stand in the world of alternative fuels. If we knew years ago we were gonna run out of oil in 2005 (now 2015), why were we issuing APs by the dozen? Or... if the abundance of cars on our roads couldn't be helped, where's our very own durian-fueled cars?