Emcye: I replied to your post re: Kundera as did Rocky.

Personally, I don’t care whether we can buy big vehicles for less money or more money, I’ll be glad to see them go—-forever. What a ridiculous statement…easy for him to say. Whether one is rich or poor, it is long past time to be thinking of the mess our cars are making of the environment. As for the Big 3? I could have told them years ago to stop with the big SUV gas guzzling cars already. Now, look what’s happened. If they had spent their time being innovative and inventive, we wouldn’t be in this mess now; probably would not be using fossil fuels at all.

I’ll look into it further - trying not to regurge disinformation. If this is not doable, something surely is. I’d hesitate to assume Buffet is short-sighted and I’m certain he knows a thing or two about making the most of resources. My point: Green solutions such as fuel-cell and nanotechnology are close-at-hand but economic gridlock suppresses their development, distribution and widespread accessibility. Corporations overprice goods to developing countries, export jobs and import products and underpaid workers rather than restructuring their business institutions. It’s an alliance of expediency and private interest. The only force to break that gridlock is US - with consumer demand and citizen awareness. I’d like to be on the side of remembering how capable we are of mechanical, scientific and cultural breakthroughs - and freeing up mass ingenuity. - So many innovations driving our modern society were home-grown, cooked up in entrepenuers’ garages. I find that fascinating, and hopeful. Marie Curie first isolated radioactive isotopes in a shed. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard kicked off Silicon Valley by launching HP in their garage. Bill Bowerman started Nike by melting old shoes with his wife’s waffle iron, in his garage. Steve Jobs and his dad built stuff with Heath Kits; he and Wozniak started Apple out of Steve’s folks’ garage. And if Larry Page and Sergey Brin hadn’t started their little enterprise in a garage in Menlo Park, we’d be having an even harder time checking our facts on Google.