Tesla electric cars have the equivalent of 400 horsepower!
The best application for electric vehicle technology today is for motorcycles due to the cost. People can make them on their own, as strong and as (not an official word) off-roady as needed.
Biomass and ethanol can be carbon neutral. The reason is simply this. A plant that wasn't buried underground and fossilized uses carbon from the atmosphere to form itself. So basically each year, your crop sucks in the same amount of carbon as your vehicle puts out.
Digging for fossil fuels is quite different.
A change in the climate that is imperceptible to humans can destroy a lot of resources. Think about places that depend on water from glaciers. If the temperature rises just a little bit and the glaciers melt and go into the sea they may have to import water.
When I was still living in Greece we saw a huge percentage of forests burning (along with quite a few people too). This may be a sign that the globe is (on average) ever so slightly increasing in temperature.
Here is a link about the bushfires in australia:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/25/climate-council-clear-link-bushfiresHere is a video I'm watching now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJUA4cm0RckI guess the reason I'm not ultra concerned about global warming is that the country in which I come from (Greece) doesn't have that much to lose. While having for its size a gigantic coastline, the elevations are such that even if you melt the entire world's ice the map barely changes.
Now I live in Florida. The ice melting (if it happens) is a problem for the next generations. Now we just have to deal with a little more unpredictable weather and a bunch of forrest fires.
Global warming also makes more rain and snow in places that already had those. I wonder if the rainfall increase will be significant enough. We (humanity) could totally milk this effect and have more hydroelectric energy around. (At least until something better comes along).
About the methanol thing, is it a way of efficiently converting natural gas to something that can be used in normal cars? If that's possible I'm interested.