Every now and then, I need to sort a stack of a few dozen numbered envelopes in numerical order. The first two digits are the same (year) and the last two digits go up to 70-something.

I once used quicksort, but found it too cumbersome for the task at hand.

What I do now is just deal them into piles by the second digit. Each stack is small enough that it's easy to just eyeball-sort them, starting with the 0 stack and ending at the 7 stack.

Uranium "running out" is hundreds or a thousand years away -- assuming we abandon the insanely wasteful "Once through and throw most of the fuel away" cycle. That doesn't count extracting uranium from sea water, which the Japanese demonstrated back in the 70s could be done with an ion exchange process for a few hundred dollars a pound in 1970s dollars. And then there's thorium...

The omni-obstructionists and the arithmetic denialists oppose any energy source -- that's any energy source -- that risks allowing the continuing of technological civilization. If it threatens to provide enough energy, it will be opposed. Every tiime. See Paul Erlich's editorial expressing horror at the possibility that there might have been something to cold fusion back in the 80s.

Detroit's problems can't be fixed by just saying "Oh, the poor people, let's throw billions of dollars at them." Detroit's problems are like the problems of a meth addict. You can't help the meth addict by giving him money for more meth. You have to get him off the meth first -- which means, he has to want to get off the meth; if he wants to keep doing meth, sad to say, there is no help for him. That's just grim reality

Helping the people of Detroit is going to require fixing Detroit's endemic problems, but there's no significant constituencey in Detroit for fixing the problems. Fixing the problems are going to be masively unpopular in Detroit, resulting in either abject failure of the attempt, or constant shrieks of "That un-Democratic!!"

I don't see it among those who loudly and continuously complain about CO2. The most they will allow is "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, not anything capable of powering a 24x7 365.24 days per year industrial economy. That is, nuclear.

Yes, there are exceptions. James Hansen is one. They are, however, very few and far between. Most of the people "oh so concerned about CO2" are also shrieking technophobes whenever nuclear is mentioned.

Because you haven't "upgraded". The old Google Maps had this feature (I think you had to enable it from "Labs"), but they took it out of the new maps.

They also removed the "Select a rectangle and zoom to it" feature.

For both of those reasons, I downgraded back to the old one. I have no interest whatsoever in "upgrading" unless and until those features are put back.

That's all I see of these web pages that are nothing but flash -- a big blank nothing, and a little icon telling me that NoScript has blocked something.

At that point, I decide just how interested I am in the content of the page after all. Usually, the answer is "Not interested enough", and I close the tab.

There's a lot of bad stuff already in that general area.

Google Maps satellite view of the Yucca Flats area: http://goo.gl/maps/y7DcV

Each of those craters is an nuclear bomb crater, with fission products and residual plutonium completely uncontained, except by the fact that they're underground.

The waste at Yucca Mountain, by contrast, would have been very stringently contained, mixed with molten glass and cast into solid lumps, inside concrete and steel casks. Not just sitting inside a hole in the bottom of a crater.

It's not NIMBY.

It's BANANAs.

Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

At last, Hansen is turning his attention to something that can make it possible to phase out burning of fossil fuels. Just "Don't Burn Fossil Fuels" without any alternative (and "sunny days when the wind happens to be blowing" energy is NOT an alternative) are never going to replace 24x7x365.24 energy.

The biggest is what's called the Domestic Manufacturing Deduction. It's a 2004 tax change meant to encourage companies to manufacture in the U.S. It allows companies of almost any type to deduct from their taxable income up to 9 percent of profits from domestic manufacturing. Under the rule, oil and gas companies were classified as manufacturers, but their deduction was capped at 6 percent.

This provision alone is expected to save the oil and gas industry $18.2 billion over the next ten years, or 42 percent of the $44 billion total.

The oil industry feels unfairly singled out. "It can't be good for some and not for others or it is just a punishment," says Stephen Comstock, the tax policy manager at the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry lobbying group.

Another subsidy, established in 1913 to encourage domestic drilling, allows oil companies to deduct more quickly all of the so-called intangible costs of preparing a site for drilling.

To accountants, intangible costs are costs for things that have no salvage value when the well runs dry, including clearing land and pouring concrete. Ordinarily, a business would have to deduct these costs over the life of the drilling site. Instead, small, independent drillers are allowed to deduct all of these expenses in the first year; major, so-called integrated companies like ExxonMobil can deduct 70 percent in the first year.

The break is worth $12.5 billion over the next ten years.

Comstock compares the oil industry's ability to write off the cost of preparing a well to other companies' ability to write off research and development costs. Other tax experts say this is clearly a subsidy.

A rule dating from 1926 that establishes how oil companies can depreciate the value of their wells allows drillers to deduct 15 percent of the well's revenue from its taxable income per year. This is instead of a more traditional depreciation scheme in which the cost of the well is depreciated over the well's life. The tax break was created in part to simplify accounting, so companies wouldn't have to guess how long an oil or gas field would produce in order to calculate how to depreciate it. It can be a boon: The total of the deductions over the life of the well can sometimes be bigger than what the company actually spent on the well.

This provision was eliminated for major oil companies in 1975, but it continues for independent producers. The break is worth $11 billion over 10 years.

Royalties that companies pay foreign governments for the oil they extract are not deductible from U.S taxes. But often the industry is allowed to claim royalties as foreign taxes, which are deductible. Obama and Senate Democrats call this a loophole, and want to close it. Obama doesn't include this in his $44 billion proposal, but Whitney Stanco, an analyst at MF Global, calculates that removing this benefit could cost the industry $8.5 billion over ten years.

So, if you increase the fuel costs of coal plants by 33%, plus whatever the costs are of the CO2 capture technology are, but forbid them to raise rates to pay for it... What happens then? What is their profit margin currently? Don't quote billions$$, quote me percentages of rates. Is there some reason you believe that it is impossible for electric utilities to go bankrupt?