How much energy would be saved if electric planes were launched similar to how jets take off from aircraft carriers.

Would the savings be marginal or make a big impact?

I don't know how many times you go on trips like that, but I imagine it happening once a year. If that's the case, and it were me, I'd just rent a vehicle that can handle those challenges for the vacation, so I could keep the advantages of owning an EV for all the other times of the year.

But I totally get the hesitation. Imagining some scenario is not the same as having experienced it. Which goes both ways, I suppose.

Not a lot of people know this but known oil reserves will last us ~42 years, source: https://www.worldometers.info/...
(summary for at the source is the number of years since 2016, you can do the math to see for yourself that it's currently 41.87 years left)

I realize that you said, "taking into account the increasing rate of moving to renewables". But that transition will be slow, and how close to running out of oil will we get before we are only using the crude for plastics? Currently, about 10% of our oil goes into making plastics (https://1bagatatime.com/learn/plastic-bags-petroleum/), so we will need a good supply left in the ground to prolong our ability to make plastic widgets.

Perhaps you're right. Mine are the drive for 6-8 hours kind of road trips.

Horses can reproduce and jump obstacles. Yet, in the end, the lack of these features never stopped mass adoption of gas cars.

Similarly, EVs don't need to be better at absolutely everything to trigger mass adoption.

I'm in Ottawa, Canada. Admittedly, our EV is a second vehicle, but soon after buying it we realized that we didn't need our other gas SUV as our primary vehicle and it just sits in our garage and only gets used when my wife and I both have to drive somewhere that day.

We prefer to take the EV on road trips.

I live 80km (50 miles) round trip from my workplace. And a couple of winters ago, when we still had outdoor sports, I would have to drive the kids to outdoor hockey after work which was another 93 km (58 miles) round-trip - in the dead of winter so around -30C (-22F). Never once was worried about range.

But I also know my range needs and climate, so I made sure to buy an EV with enough range to handle it. But my point is, EVs aren't only for places like SoCal or for people with short commutes.

Trees sequester carbon in life, but when they die and breakdown via bacteria/fungi/natural processes, that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere. There are exceptions, from what I've read, but only enough to make a marginal difference.

So this means that one tree is not much of a net reducer of atmospheric carbon over its entire lifecycle (including its breakdown). It's more of a temporary carbon sink.

If we want trees to act as a permanent carbon sink, we need to let our forests grow in size and keep growing indefinitely. But there's obviously a natural limit to how long this can continue.

Or we could chop trees down and bury them so they can't breakdown like they normally would.

Wasn't sure for a while when he started calling the North Korean dictator names.

And others mentioned how he got close to starting a war with Iran.

And I'm sure all those countries he called "sh*t hole" countries weren't very happy with him.

the list goes on. Seems like the world didn't respond to his attempts to start wars, not that he never did enough to have started them.

If this impeachment makes it past the senate, he can't run for re-election. And this one might possibly go through, seeing as many senators changed their mind about objecting electoral votes as a result of the incident.

I think this is why Donald finally conceded - to lessen the probability he'll actually be removed by the senate to prepare for his run for president in 2024.

Would this imply that those who work shift work have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's? That could be a large data set to tap into with all the nurses, police officers, firefighters, etc.

If so, seems like we need to come up with another solution to stop shift work. I heard from another study a while back that they also correlated higher incidence of cancer with shift work too.

I believe these sorts of questions are (or were) being litigated in court - where actual evidence is required.

Last I checked, they only won 1 out of 59 lawsuits. And the one that they won retracted an invalid extension to the ballot cure deadline. This only affected "probably fewer than 100 ballots". Not exactly an avenue for fraud if it's gaining you 100 votes - and there's no reason to assume all 100 of those votes affected were for Biden.

It's easy to ask sinister sounding questions. And maybe that's all that's needed to rile up a voter base. But for it to get anywhere in the courts, actual evidence needs to be provided. It's just too bad that the voter base doesn't require the same level of evidence to form their opinions.

Here's what I don't get. If one party would have tried to fraudulently steal a state, this would have to require time and planning. So, it only makes sense to focus efforts on the swing states as identified by the polls before the election. Those states were:
Arizona: Biden 50%, Trump 47% --- ultimately went to Biden
Florida: Biden 51%, Trump 48% --- ultimately went to Trump
Michigan: Biden 51%, Trump 44% --- ultimately went to Biden
North Carolina: Biden 49%, Trump 47% --- ultimately went to Trump
Pennsylvania: Biden 50%, Trump 46% --- ultimately went to Biden
Wisconsin: Biden 53%, Trump 45% --- ultimately went to Biden

So:
1) If these voter fraud methods are so effective, why didn't Biden win Florida and North Carolina?
2) Why would the Biden campaign have bothered committing fraud in Georgia or Nevada?
3) Also, Biden was up in all of these swing states, even if the polls were off, it'd be a safe bet to think he'd win most of them, so why bother doing the fraud at all?

Seems to me that the party with the biggest motivation to commit fraud, based on the poll numbers, would have been the Trump campaign.

^This

Many people don't realize how often mutations happen. Regular RNA viruses have a mutation rate of 1 out of every 1000 replications. This RNA virus is lower than that because it has some mutation 'spell checkers' but it's not nearly as low as DNA replication. Scientists had already catalogued 12,000 mutations back in September.

There are millions/billions/trillions of viral particles in each infected person, so each person is a vector for mutations. Most of these will be benign. The trend across all viruses is to make the pathogen less deadly. But there's always the possibility that the virus will be better able to spread combined with becoming more deadly - like what happened with the second wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu.

We don't want enough mutations to occur for COVID that we can't develop vaccines fast enough to keep up with the never ending waves of new virus strains. It would be like the whack-a-mole game that is our vaccine response to the seasonal flu.

I think they've made the warranty period with the worst drivers in mind. The people who take care of their investments will get far longer than the warranty period. For example, the warranty on my car is just 8 years or 100,000 miles. But tests have shown the battery can last for 3-5x that mileage.

63% of all residents in the US have a garage or car port. This doesn't include the homes that have no garage or carport but do have a dedicated laneway. So it's not unrealistic that my original source that quoted 70% is accurate.

Funny, if you had asked me for an estimate on how long it would take, I would have suggested something like 20 years. And I don't doubt that in some places the infrastructure would need to be beefed up to accommodate a higher load. But back to one of my original points. Since this only represents 30% of the population, and this 30% are already in a position to take alternate transportation because they live close to their destinations and have public transportation at their disposal, it's not as large of a problem as you make it out to be.

Again, 70% of the EV owners would be charging at night taking advantage of the off-peak electricity. But let's think more critically about the 30% apartment dwellers. What's their average mileage in a day? This source from 2009 data says 26.1 miles for city dwellers or, to convert this to electricity usage, 6.525 kWh per person per day (an EV can go about 1 mile for every 0.25kWh, Tesla's are higher, some are lower). Assuming all 30% of the population who don't have their own garage/laneway are city dwellers, this puts their electricity consumption up to 642,451,500 kWh per day or 234,494,797,500 kWh per year (population of America is 328.2 million, making the population of city dwellers 98.46 million). Compare that against the current average electricity use in the states of 3.9 TRILLION kWh per year, peak demand is roughly twice the nightly low, so let's assume 2/3 of that electricity is during the day or 2.6 trillion kWh per year.

Also, from a country's perspective, we can look to save electricity from fuel refinery, which is about 0.2 kWh per gallon. This would apply to 100% of the US population, rather than just 30%. This would save the US 28.5 billion kWh in electricity, roughly, based on the number of gallons the US uses in a year - I'm assuming all fuel refinement would stop for 100% of the population here, which isn't accurate, but it gives you a picture of the scale we're looking at. Assuming this refinement process is spread out evenly across the day, that puts half of that during peak usage, or 14.25 billion kWh

So, to summarize, you're making a big deal about an increase of about 8.5%. Not nothing, but it's also not crazy either. For example, from 2004-2010, electricity demand rose 5.7%. Admittedly this is overall electricity demand, and my 8.5% figure is just my peak hours estimate, but using the 2/3 figure from before, you would get 3.8% over 6 years. Assuming the same rate of increase is possible, we can get to 8.5% increase in 14 years.

For comparison's sake, if the other 70% of the population switch to EVs, that would increase the electricity demand by 873 billion kWh (67% of off-peak demand). Considering that off-peak is roughly half the peak demand, this increase wouldn't put us over capacity and require new power plants to be built. Infrastructure to the homes shouldn't need to be improved in almost all cases because the home can already handle its peak load. Individual home owners may need to invest in poly panels or wiring to be installed to put in chargers, but the existing infrastructure to the home should be sufficient.

I've done the math. I'm not "VASTLY" overstating how easy it will be.