...nor does pointing out a single fallacy or bit of flawed logic in one's world view do any good.

So that's why I figure it's worth mentioning that this thread, referring to "Overpopulation Alarmism" is using a highly alarmist strawman (fallacy) to make a dubious point.

...nor does pointing out a single fallacy or bit of flawed logic in one's world view do any good.

while gasoline for cars does represent the bulk of oil consumption, a large part of oil demand is not from passenger cars.

Even if everyone in the US switched to hybrid cars tomorrow (not going to happen unless they tax cars/gasoline sky-high, subsidize hybrids like crazy, or just oulaw regular cars), it would only address a small part of the problem.

US gasoline consumption for cars/light trucks is 140 billion gallons per year.

Increasing mileage by 15% for every car in the US would reduce consumption by ~ 21 billion gallons to 119 billion gallons.

If gasoline consumption continues to grow at 2% per year, you would reach 140 billion gallons of demand in approximately 8 years, and you are back to where you started.

Additionally, consider the following...

-Virtually all trucks require diesel
-Virtually all trains run on diesel
-Virtually all ships run on diesel
-All planes consume jet fuel (no current substitutes)
-All plastics (nylon, rayon, PVC, etc) require petroleum derivatives (no current substitutes)
-Most manufacturing uses oil derivatives (ethylene, benzene, toluene, etc) in one form or another (no current substitutes)
-Most fertilizers and virtually all pesticides are created from oil derivatives (no current substitutes)
-All asphalt requires oil derivatives

As for home energy consumption, crude oil only supplies 3% of the entire US electrical grid. 50% is from coal, 18% from natural gas, 19% from nuclear, 8% from hydro-electric, with renewables comprising ~2%.

Put in all the solar panels you want. The impact on US oil consumption is trivial.

Finally, biofuels just trades one problem for another. Producing corn to create ethanol just substitutes food for fuel. Corn is heavily used in the feeding of livestock as well as human food and syrup for sweeteners in cooking and beverages. Creating billions of gallons of Ethanol demand drives prices for corn sky-high, while at the same time driving up the price of other crops that grow on corn-friendly land such as soybeans (also used for feed and food).

This is aside from the fact that meeting global gasoline demand would require clear-cutting hundreds of millions of acres of forest world-wide.

The entire US corn crop was approximately 9 billion bushels in 2006. This is anticipated to rise to 13 billion bushels in 2007.

Current technology allows the production of 2.5 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn.

If you took the entire 2007 corn crop of the US and converted it to Ethanol, you would yield approximately 32.5 billion gallons of Ethanol.

Current US gasoline consumption for light vehicles alone (passenger cars and light trucks) is approximately 140 billion gallons of Gasoline.

Think about this carefully.

Entire US corn crop - 13 billion bushels
IF the Entire US corn crop was converted to Ethanol - 32.5 billion gallons
US Light vehicle Gasoline consumption - 140 billion gallons

Average corn yield per acre - 140 bushels
Average ethanol yield per acre - 350 gallons

Total acres required to match shortfall to switch to 100% ethanol - 308 million Acres

Total US acres currently growing corn - 90 million acres
Total farmland in the United States - 983 million acres
Percent of worldwide corn production represented by the US - 10.3%

In other words, if you convert almost 1/2 of all US farmland to corn production, then convert ALL the corn to Ethanol, you would have just enough ethanol to fuel the existing cars on the road. This would be assuming that all the land was suitable for growing corn (which it isn't).

You would then need to plant another 80 million acres every year just to keep up with growing gasoline demand. In less than 10 years, you would then run out of farmland and need to start levelling forests or cities.

Another way to look at it is if you took 1/2 of all the corn grown on the Planet Earth and converted it to ethanol, you would have just enough to fuel all the light vehicles in the United States, and within 6 years would be consuming ALL the corn on the planet.

This does not include trucks, buses, planes, ships or trains.

This assumes of course that either you don't want any food grown in the US at all, or that you want to eliminate corn use worldwide for anything but Ethanol.

I've found that the only way I can get them to think about what they're regurgitating is to employ even more extreme than they do to try and get them to see the flaws themselves. It almost never works, but at least it lobotomizes them temporarily and the shock to their system might get them to reconsider their view.

I have found that many of the most rabid extremists when it comes to a particular view are often the least educated in terms how practical their positions actually are.

A very common one that I run into are people that are rabidly opposed to the use of Oil
Here is an excerpt from a post I made about 5 years ago from the now defunct Politics forum explaining just SOME of the difficulties involved in Peak Oil and the substitution problem...

Overpopulation is a myth.