Rudolf Diesel Quotes
The diesel engine can be fed with vegetable oils and would help considerably in the development of agriculture of the countries which use it. The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time.
This was an amazingly prescient view of the future.
Rudolf Diesel, 1858–1913, German inventor famous for the invention of the Diesel engine, Statements made in 1911 and 1912 respectively
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Almost a century later dirty vegetable oils from fast food restaurants were used in Diesel truck and tractor engines very effectively and efficiently.
The American public did not accept the need for conservation during Carter’s administration. Carter and many people then thought the major problem was that we were running out of fossil fuels. With shale gas and other techniques there was much more fuel that was suspected. However, the real problem was clean fuel and carbon causing global warming. So wind, solar and other “clean” energy sources have become very inporantant.
Bush, as President Jimmy Carter had done before him, called for reduced dependency on foreign oil and increased research in other forms of energy production.
The notion of a hydrogen transportation economy appeals to most scientists, environmentalists, engineers, and many ordinary citizens. But the vested interests of the oil industry and the American automobile industry were lined up against it and when this statement was made 6 years into the administration of George W. Bush there had been very little done by the Government to facilitate any of the elements Bodman stated were so important. See {585492} for a similar quotation by Bodman, also with no government action.
His assertion that wind energy is less expensive than the fossil fuel alternative is not accurate if one accounts for the costs on the basis of conventional accounting methods. It was at that time more expensive which is why it’s use was limited. However, the existing methods of accounting did not charge the fossil fuels for the environmental degregation that they cause and the cost to society to overcome these or live with them. More important there is no charge to the cost of fossil fuels for the deleterious health effects that their extraction and use cause. Global warming / climate change is not considered at all in the economic analysis.
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, famous for the invention of the Diesel engine, and for his suspicious death at sea. Diesel was the namesake of the 1942 film Diesel.
