Problems of scale, mainly. While technically feasible to produce bio-diesel out of lots of things, or to convert bio-mass to something very similar to gasoline or JP4, the amount of input material to sustain current consumption, let alone increase it, isn’t available. If you are very rich, you could fuel your personal automobile, and maybe that would work for many very rich people, but the mass of the rest of us, currently commuting to work in private automobiles, won’t be able to afford it.
So we will do something else to get to work. This is where the question really does become political: do we have the will to begin, right now, to build the infrastructure we will need when we can’t fuel our transportation and power generation with mined fossil fuel, or will we continue to build infrastructure that depends on fossil fuel and when it is no longer affordable we are left with a lot of useless stuff on our hands, and we don’t have the infrastructure that allows us to move forward?
The fossil fuel interests are funding the ‘stick our head in the sand’ option and spend a lot of money obfuscating the facts. “Follow the money” indeed. It’s hardly worth while arguing with these folks, they have a whole industry dedicated to producing ‘studies’ and ‘facts’ that support their position. Mostly easily debunked, but it keeps getting recycled (Oh! the irony!)
Well, you know what they say: One person’s pile of crap is someone else’s compost heap.
I find it passing strange that when one points out the obvious, some people feel like you are trying to force them into a gulag where they will have to eat tofu and seaweed and carry their overlords around in sedan chairs along trails they were forced to carve out of the hillsides with picks and shovels and large baskets of dirt on their backs. The illusion of entitlement dies hard.
