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Thank you, it is interesting for me to hear the views of Americans, specially the right winged ones, I often identify myself with. Sadly, and I am not talking about you, they often seem not to be able to see past the fact that my country is part of Europe or something like that.

Many of them are beutiful, like girls all over the world. One of them is participating, to the excitment of the nation in Miss World today. I guess one of the reason many foreigners talk about how beutiful our women are, are because many of them are blond, and/or with blue eyes. But as both of these features are regressive, they will not be so in one or two generations if they turn their interests to foreigners of more dark complexions. If that is good or bad I can not say.

Other reason could be good general health and good education, and specially they tend to be rather young when participating in many activities wich only older girls tend to do in other countries, that is, they dont just look young, they are young. But Clare, are you not a woman?

Our geothermal heat is not free, but it is in relative abundance in most of the country, so it reduces our energy costs greatly and thus increasing the living standard here by many factors. I think I heard once that if we would have to heat everything with imported oil/coal, our heating cost would be five times what it is today.

Two thirds of all our energy usage comes from renewable energy, both geothermal and hydroelectric (from waterfalls), we have ability to increase it greatly, but it would cost us more of our untouched natural beuty, so we will have to be careful when increasing our energy production. We use it to get big energy using productions, like aluminium companies here, most of them are American.

The rest, one third, is the energy we use in transportation, cars, ships (our big fishing fleet) and airplanes (whose fleet is also big), and that energy needs to be imported. Not because we don´t have enough energy to use on these, but because there is not available good enough technology to store it well enough, cheaply enough and small enough to use in transportation vehicles.

That is one of the reasons we are participating in many companies mission of producing hydrogen economy here in Iceland, we are essentially making our country a test ground for that technology. Sadly that technology is not yeat good enough to compeet with gasoline. And maybe it newer will, as biodiesel technologie is propably surpassing the Hydrogen technologie, and it will be easier to produce it and use within existing infrastructure.

Sorry for going astrai from what we were talking about, this was just something I needed to get of my chest. Pleace tell me your and yours perspective on the EU, on Iceland and the future of energy issues.