That's not true, though.

Yes, they absolutely do. The wealthy buy the laws, and the laws determine what kind of car or house you can have and how you should care for them.

They are deciding that right now. It's called the "big beautiful bill". They are deciding who gets taxed how much, and on what basis, so they can decide that you get to keep less of your money, and they get to keep more of theirs. Denialism doesn't change that.

It's absolutely a capitalism problem right now, because capitalism is what gives the people making the decisions the power to make those decisions. Capitalism decided that corporations should be able to make political donations, so that capitalism could make more of the decisions.

You can make biodiesel from algae. There's no need for it to be based on topsoil, or displace agriculture.

Yes.

It doesn't matter what kind of government you have, if you don't have an active hand in it, it's going to get away from you. The type of government only changes the direction in which the ball rolls.

Capitalism itself doesn't attempt to distribute control or not distribute control. It only "tries" to give the bulk of the control to the people with the bulk of the money. If those people make rules that give them all the money, then they get all of the control.

It's just another kind of economic system that, left to its own devices, eats itself eventually. Its productivity means that it does it faster. Capitalism running wild has led to America both becoming the most powerful nation on the planet and growing up to threaten the existence of humanity in just a couple of hundred centuries. Yes, we're all impressed with how dangerous it is, but let's exercise a little more caution in where we point it, shall we?

Read the report or don't, but don't waste my time with your offtopic bullshit.

I literally provided a link to a study showing that algae is viable.

Nobody should be teaching you how to read at this late date. You skipped over text around that text that was important.

Understanding of the word "control" and of the nature of currency.

I shouldn't be having to teach you how to think, either.

Insisting that every solution solve every problem is of course only a way to avoid improving anything because it's hard.

People also like the convenience of other forms of transportation, where they are available. What is or is not available is only partially determined by what is in people's best interests, or even what they ask for.

Everything is always changing into something else.

Very large diesels indeed tend to be kept running for longer periods. I would serve those with biofuel from algae. Maybe some biodiesel in warm climates, green diesel anywhere else or where a small decrease in power is unacceptable. I still think that the best solution is to increase the use of battery electric where possible, which decreases the difficulty of changing over to biofuels by simply using less liquid fuel period. This is extremely feasible for rail use, and in fact this is partly for the reason you describe. There are diesel-electric locomotives getting converted over from PWM to inverter drives! If we can do that, we can also convert them to be dual power so that they can run from catenary wires where that is convenient. Their being series hybrids makes this a relatively small change to their overall design and construction.

We've got more than enough land to replace our transportation fuel needs with biodiesel from algae. Loads of estimates are a websearch away. We're also decreasing that, and can decrease it more, which decreases the amount of land needed. This generally requires adopting more solar and wind, and you need overproduction to make up for those times when there's little supply of either, but there's loads of unexploited land with low or even positive impact from solar installs in particular. Solar is a benefit to some types of agriculture, it can be used to reduce evaporative loss from reservoirs and canals, you can reduce HVAC costs by covering roofs and car parks, and so on.

I've posted such a bunch of times before, we (both you and I, and Slashdotters in general) have argued about this on Slashdot ad infinitum, I'm not going to chase that shit down again because we're arguing about it again. Start with the usual reference for the keywords you will want. (The original official link for this report is 404 for a while now, typical lazy bullshit where they can't muster a 301, and I'm not going to scare up the archive.org link, I found this* by title.)

* NREL/TP-580-24190 "A Look Back at the U.S. Department of Energy's Aquatic Species Program: Biodiesel from Algae"

It seems to me like the truth is somewhere in between your two statements. The GP is projecting their situation onto people who it doesn't fit, and you're allowing perfect to be the enemy of good and ignoring useful parts of their comment.

On one hand, the average commute is now a half an hour, and that means for a lot of people, charging from 120V isn't going to suit their needs. On the other hand, that's an average, so it means it will suit the needs of a lot of other people. You're right that we would have to tear up streets for absurd periods of time to add service to a lot of apartment complexes, but you're ignoring that we could also run a lot of 120V circuits for charging without having to add any exterior infrastructure at all. We could therefore reasonably serve a whole lot of additional with drivers sufficient charging capacity.

Anyway here's the point where I lose most of my audience, when I suggest that in addition to doing that, we should be bolstering public transportation systems to make them serve more people, at least in the places where there are easy wins to be had in that department. The majority of the people for whom it's hardest to add charging live in places which could be better served by public transportation without major structural changes to rights of way, let alone society.

One thing that could improve efficiency in America is to start moving vehicles towards the smaller end of the scale. First you have to gradually bring in some additional licensing requirements for large vehicles, to get the incompetents out of those so that people in smaller vehicles don't have to fear being obliterated by a barely controlled semi-tractor or brodozer. Is it really wise for a person with an ordinary license to be allowed to operate a nine thousand pound electric Suburban that can do zero to sixty in four seconds? Does Oakley Budweiser the third genuinely need an eight thousand pound diesel with twenty-four inch wheels and an inch of sidewall to get to the vape shop? I guarantee that most of those people won't be able to pass a real driving test. IME, half of our licensed commercial drivers can't keep their lane.

The question was "Shouldn't it be possible to design farm equipment that could run off of diesel fuel for the short term but switch to E85 once ethanol-producing agriculture is scaled for it?" and your answer does not suitably answer that question. Biodiesel is not easier to run in the same engine as E85 than any other kind of diesel; it is equally unsuitable for that purpose.

Putting that aside, the other problem with biodiesel is that it sucks. This isn't a strictly fair statement in that there are contexts where it works fine, and using a small percentage (3-5% specifically) in a diesel mixture is beneficial to lubricity and has basically no drawbacks, but biodiesel has a number of significant drawbacks which make it less suitable than petrodiesel. If not made carefully it can be harmfully acidic, its gel point is at a much higher temperature than petrodiesel or green diesel, and while it cleans deposits from petrodiesel from engines, it can leave its own different type of deposits behind. As such, biodiesel is much better suited to being a fuel additive than to providing the bulk of power. It also raises some types of emissions while decreasing others.

It's true that most of the oxygen we breathe is released by algae, but biofuel from algae does little to produce more net breathable oxygen, because the carbon taken from the atmosphere (and split from the oxygen) is released and recombined with oxygen again when the biofuels are burned. It's possible that some of the captured carbon will wind up in soil, but the goal is always going to be to turn as much of it as possible into fuel. For example, you could separate the lipids and make them into diesel fuel, and use the remainder to make butanol — a replacement for gasoline, where acetone is made in the same process and can be used to adjust octane. (The process also produces ethanol.)

Honestly that's one of the best things about biofuels — doing them doesn't conflict with anything else, especially where you are making compatible fuels. Butanol fuel can be mixed with gasoline. Bio-based diesel (whether transesterified like biodiesel, or distilled like "green diesel") can be mixed with petrodiesel. They can both be stored and transported using existing infrastructure. Since you can mix them in the vehicle in any proportion, you can mix them into the overall system in any proportion as well.

Of course, the same is also true of synfuels, but they have a higher energy cost. You could cover this cost by installing more PV solar, but it's probably always going to be more efficient to charge a battery than to make synfuel. And burning fuel always produces some emissions besides CO2 and water vapor; you're always burning some lubricant, you're always making some CO and NOx, you're always producing some soot. And the efficiency never gets up to where an EV is. You can get real close with a fuel cell, but never quite there, not least because the fuel cell is only efficient at one level of output just like an ICEV is, and demand is variable. Therefore you're always going to need a buffer, and will have to pay the efficiency penalty involved. The bigger a battery bank gets, the more opportunity there is for efficiency, because you can use different numbers of cells to approach ideal numbers.

Can't can be solved. Don't want to can be addressed with laws.

This is nonsense. Biofuels are viable.

Easier doesn't mean the other thing is impossible.

I agree with this part, but not because we cannot use batteries, only because we will not. It might also make more sense to continue to use liquid fuels for some purposes, but then, it makes even more sense to do some other thing. For example, using more wind again for shipping, and accepting some delays for some cargoes. For some things (mostly bulk industrial products) it just doesn't matter how long they take to get there, what matters is that enough is arriving at any particular time. But we will not make a shift as long as the owning class can make more profit by doing it how we do it now.

Infinitely? No. Nothing is infinite, this is no exception. 1/4 to 1/3 of a vehicle's average lifetime energy consumption is spent in production; 1/4 for a gasser, 1/3 for an EV, somewhere in between but probably closer to 1/3 for a hybrid since it has both kinds of power systems, even though the battery is much smaller. (Also, the amount of energy it takes to make a battery has decreased with time — most lithium battery chemistries no longer require a lengthy hot cure.) Both vehicles also have a bunch of plastic parts, and the plastic overwhelmingly still comes from petroleum.

The big benefit of EVs is recyclability. Batteries can be recycled, and this saves a lot of energy. We should also be using more aluminum and less steel for construction. This is a trend which is already occurring for all types of vehicles, but it could be happening faster. Aluminum costs more energy to refine initially, but you reach energy parity once it's been recycled once because it takes so much less energy to do that. Recycled aluminum retains all of the properties of the original alloy, except for heat treatment, without doing anything special. It takes additional energy and materials input to achieve that with steel, which is also heat treated, and its heat treatment also requires more energy. Every time you recycle aluminum after the first time, you're saving energy compared to using steel, and it can now be cheaply sorted using laser spectroscopy.