The last of the interceptors

Theres a History of the interceptor and a lego version[0] but thats not what I'm wanting to talk about...I'm worried. I've been reading some things lately about whats happening in the world and thinking about them and they are worrying me.

Firstly, I don't know whether anyone else has heard about the possibilities of power cuts over the upcoming winter? Basically the natural gas supply has been shrinking for a while now and its looking likely there isn't going to be enough to feed our homes and power stations with the gas we want to use. Of course, this might just be scaremongering to push the future contract prices up but if the supply has been dwindling then maybe it doesn't happen this year, maybe not next, but sooner or later it will happen. How are we, those of us who dwell in these rabbit hutches, going to cope without heat?

Then there was some American dude talking about hybrid cars, and how they're actually not an environmental play but rather a performance enhancement. Now I'm not sure thats true - one of the most significant things about hybrids is the ability to use regenerative braking, turning your speed back into electricity when you're slowing down. Right now they're not very efficient but if you can reclaim half that energy you're going to be getting a decent improvement over a normal friction braking system (theres also an observation that the regenerative brakes won't suffer performance problems when heavily used, since they don't heat up in the same way - though some of the non-regenerative electrical brake systems will have different properties under heavy usage, though I suspect they get better at stopping you rather than worse).

So this drove me to thinking about a couple of other questions - the energy cost of making a new car is around 1/3 the total lifetime energy cost, is this still true for hybrids? If so, this suggests that it is more efficient to continue using existing cars for longer rather than encourage a switch sooner. Though there are other factors to take into account - pollution and safety among others.

Next the SUV secondary market in the States is crashing, they're starting to notice petrol prices rising and switching to cheaper-to-run cars.

Then I was thinking about slavery. There is a lot of racial tension remaining in this world, largely generated by what was the slave culture many years ago. And I wondered how some of the people in places we currently consider 'sources of cheap labour' will view their position in the world in, say, 100 years time. Are we creating another timebomb?

Finally, there seems to be a lot religious tension around at the moment, I don't remember it being so prevalent when I was younger. So, has my view of it changed? Or are some of the things going on in the world at the moment being framed in terms of religious tension, when before they were described in other ways?

[0] And the ATeam, and cthulu