Is there NOTHING we can do?

What you can do is buy a diesel and convert it to run on vegetable oil, then monopolize the local fast-food used oil market before someone else does.

Remember though, they also drive cars and must pay the same price per gallon as everyone else. So the "extra" money they make by investing in oil or fuel stock, wont go all that far, if the price keeps climbing.

I figure if we could do it to regular diesel in Fairbanks when it got to -70 below, it wouldn't be too hard to manage it here in the lower 48... especially in states where it rarely gets below 0.

I've read up extensively on biodiesel and SVO, and there is currently no way to prevent it from gelling other than mixing it with a heavy concerntration of petrodiesel of high grade, the same way petrodiesel itself is "winterized". Kinda defeats the purpose if all you get is about a 15% dicount on your cool weather fuel costs. Also, even a highly efficient home biodiesel processing set up will still result in a fuel cost of at least $1.50 per gallon , balance that with the increased cost of cool weather processing and you end up paying nearly as much as you would just buying petrodiesel at the pump. Add to that the fact that if a way were to be found to stop the gelling the cost of biodiesel would skyrocket since way more people would want it, there's only so much used french fry oil available, and SVO runs about $2.40-2.60 per gallon wholesale already. Hardly competitive with petro. On a national scale the same folks who are bending us over at the pumps now would be the ones bending us over for a bio product, and that assumes that they could aquire enough SVO at least cost to pull that off in the first place. The amount of arable farm land large scale biodiesel processing would require would also eclipse what's already in use for food production, imagine what a bottle of Wesson oil would cost if that same land were turned over to fuel production. Think ethanol and what it's threatening to do to corn. Biodiesel is really only practical on small scale, and not by much, or the petro barons would already be exploiting it.

What I can see about being able to use fry oil is that it would be a good way of recycling it. Does anyone know what they do with it now when they change it? Where can you get a kit to change over a diesel to run on it? What does it do as to truck warranty. Void It? I have a diesel, it actually gets better mileage than my old gasoline truck did. By at least 1/3 per gallon. And yes I still run in the 70's on highway.

Sad, but we have ALOT of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, more than the middle east......
Solo

I haven't verified this, so don't chastise me too severely if I'm wrong, but I've heard that the governments of China and Mexico are in the process of drilling, (or at least in the planning stages) for these oil reserves in the gulf. If that is the case, whatever degradation of nature the environmentalists in this country were trying to prevent, will still occur, probably to a greater degree, as I would imagine they're not as mindful of the environment as we are. So....... same mess, profits go to foreign governments.

Mexico is well within their rights to drill off of their own coastline, and China is bargaining for rights to drill off the coat of Cuba, not our gulf coast. At present the drilling within our coastal waters is very limited , mostly off Louisiana and Texas, because of blocking actions in the courts by the environmentalists.

Not enough people getting involved, e-mail your Reps and Senators in DC.