I'm not at all sure that electric cars are a good way to go - they are just SO expensive in many ways.

An easily stored, transported and utilised high energy liquid that can be made from the waste products of agriculture, food processing and the brewing/distilling of alcohol seems (to me) much more sensible.

It is using what you have got, but don't want, to make something everyone would like to have, and without a lot of fuss and bother, so as long as the numbers are sensible and they seem to be as butanol can be made without having to divert raw materials or major resources, then it can be sold for use at the petrol pump to put in the cars running around at the moment with only small or even no adjustment.

There were tests of GM crops done in the UK, but only under protest. Our agriculture is very different from that in the US, and farmers had grave concerns that growing - for instance - a weedkiller resistant crop could lead to the resistance being transmitted to related weeds.

The biologists amongst us were also concerned that the pollen from a resistant crop - being so easily moved around - could lead to there being nothing but the resistant strain being grown, as seed crops could not be isolated from the environment.

Assurances were given that if there was an exclusion zone of X miles around a field growing a seed crop it would keep it from being crosspollinated.

When the first crops were sown beekeepers across the country sent in samples of pollen from their hives and it was found that the X miles was nowhere near large enough, and that there would probably always be some seed (and by extension, related weeds) which was pollinated by the resistant strain of a crop.

Combined with the increased use of pesticides which a GM crop allowed, the concept of their usefulness was questioned.

Anne the Pleater :ootd: