Originally Posted by Platy
At 30 miles per gallon, driving a car 3 miles uses as much chemical energy as a person needs to eat in one day.
Not really an ethical problem I guess, until you start talking about running cars on biodiesel and ethanol made from food crops. If you do that, you are in some sense depriving someone, somewhere, of a day's worth of food for every three miles you drive.
Maybe. With all the food we produce, it's more likely that we're taking wildlife habitat when we run our vehicles on food, than that someone would be eating EXCEPT for the fact that we're producing fuel with that food. I once saw an American official say that there is plenty of food to go around in the world, but the problem is we need paying customers.
As for biodiesel, much of it is currently made out of recycled vegetable oil, and that isn't taking food from anybody. If we shift a larger percentage of our fuel production to biodiesel, that could change, i suppose.