pequeñisimo comentario sobre el transporte

Hago copia del siguiente texto tomado de "Natural Capitalism", Hawken, Paul. :

"Imagine a conversation taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. A group of powerful and farseeing businessmen announce that they want to create a giant new industry in the United States, one that will emplow millions of people, sell a copy of its product every two seconds, and provide undreamed-of levels of personal mobility fot those who use its products. However, this innovation will also have oter conseguencies so that at the ond of one hundred years, it will have donde or be doing the following:

- Paved an area equal to all the arable land in the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, requiring maintenance costing more than $200million per day.
- Reschaped American communities and lives so as to restrict the mobility of most citizens who do not choose or are not able to own and operate the new product.
- Maimed or injured 250million people, and killed more Americans than have died in all wars in the country's history.
- Be combusting 8 million barrels of oil every day (450 gallons per person annually).
- Made the United States increasingly dependent on foreign oil at a cost of $60 billion a year.
- Relied for an increasing percentage of that oil on an unstable and largely hostile region armed partly by American oil payments, requiring the United States to make large military expenditures there and maintain continual war-readiness.
- Be killing a million wild animals per week, from deer and elk to birds, frogs, and opossums, plus tens of thousands of domestic pets.
- Be creating a din of noise and a cloud of pollution in all metropolitan areas, affecting sleep, concentration, and intelligence, making the air in some cities so unbreathable that children and the elderly cannot venture outside on certain days.
- Caused spectacular increases in asthma, emphysema, heart disease, and bronchial infections.
- Be emitting one-fourth of U.S. greenhouse gases so as to threaten global climatic stability and agriculture.
- And be creating 7 billion pounds of unrecycled scrap and waste every year.

NOW IMAGINE THEY SUCCEEDED."

Ahora falta también contrarestar un poco las cifras: en un automóbil con una eficiencia de un 20%, de las 100 partes de energía que tiene el combustible que consume, 80 de estas se gastan en calentamiento en el motor y gases de escapes (pérdidas), y sólo 20 partes se usan realmente para el movimiento del automóbil. Adicional a esto, comparando las masas promedio de un usuario y un vehículo, aproximadamente un 5% de esta energía se usa para efectivamente transportar al usuario, y el otro 95% se usa para transportar el acero del que esta construida la carrocería. Es decir, únicamente el 1% de la energía neta que recibe el automóbil se usa en transportar a su usuario.