CBS Evening News: Soybean powered car. Amazing.

[cantstandbush]

A group of inner city kids put together a beautiful auto powered by soybeans. Great story worth viewing at cbseveningnews.com.

I like what CBS is doing by asking the viewers to pick one of three sotries they would like reported. But this story is really great. Just more proof that corporate oil companies don't want fuel efficient, ecosafe cars for consumers. They would rather we fought wars (keeping the military-industrial-complex taking our money)for oil in foreign countries (to keep the oil companies raking in record profits).

Still, people bahave as though they don't give a shit. i guess they don't.

[babylonsister]

1. One of the best stories this week, cantstandbush! Why/how

could kids in a tech school throw together such a successful product when car companies can't?
The kids' sense of accomplishment must be enormous!

[FreedomAngel82]

9. Because car companies don't want to that's why

They're still making money on oil etc.

[alfredo]

2. If protecting freedom means having to miss American Idol, they

don't want any part of it.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. Saw that -- brilliant!

A half-dozen high school kids in a shop class invented the thing. I hope those kids get a patent on that car, market it and make a whole pile of money. And not get squashed by the oil industry.

[Big Kahuna]

4. Some friends of mine have a car that runs on vegetable oil

You can easily convert any deisel car's fuel system to burn new or recycled vegetable oil.

Link to article: http://www.agapecommunity.com/staticpages/index.php?page=20041130075653137

[ret5hd]

5. exactly...carbo-hydrates = hydro-carbons

[Gold Metal Flake]

6. Yup. I've done the same to my truck.

Here's some details:
http://www.freewebs.com/vegtruck/index.html

[Jayhawk Lib]

7. Interesting News Story

What the kids did was not anything that has not been done before. The fact that a bunch of high school kids put it together is really neat.

As fas as bio-diesel that is nothing new. Willie Nelson powers his bus with bio-diesel. The is not whether bio-diesel will work but it will still take a lot of fossil fuel to manufacture it and the marketing of it will probably still be done by the oil companies.

[Kansas Wyatt]

11. The point is

That twenty to thirty years ago, a lot of family farms went under when the car companies and the government could have been pushing for the discovery and improvement of this to replace foreign oil. The oil companies themselves could have cracked open their wallets a little to invest in a long term solution with this themselves, instead of buying off politicians to send the military to the Middle East to secure a few years of profits for the oil companies at the U.S. taxpayers expense.

But what the hell, a lot of family farms have been replaced by corporate farms, the car companies have thrown off thousands of jobs, our manufacturing industry has disappeared, oil companies are making record profits, and the United States is in a quagmire in the Middle East, which has everything to do with OIL.

A few in this country are doing GREAT!

Many in this country are now realizing that the 'American Dream' was only a dangling carrot that they can no longer see.

[FreedomAngel82]

8. Isn't that what Willie Nelson does with his tour bus?

He uses soybeans? Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[Wapsie B]

10. The name Tucker comes to mind for some reason here.

n/t

[enough]

12. Any word on how many acres of soybeans per year it takes

to run the car for a certain number of miles?

[Bigmack]

13. I hate to be a wet blanket...

...on this thread, but soybean oil costs a LOT of petroleum to produce. There isn't enough waste oil to run many vehicles. There isn't enough arable land in the US to provide enough biomass, let alone soybeans, to convert to fuel. The tar/oil sands are gonna produce EXPENSIVE oil.

All the "peak oil" books have been talking about this.