And that's why low-risk, low-reward businesses such as grocery stores don't exist.

Solar and Wind are great, but we don't have enough room near where people live and work to install them.

That's not a problem because HVDC only loses 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi).

Electric cars make the problem harder by increasing electricity demand.

Bidirectional charging makes the problem not harder but easier when electric vehicles are added to a virtual power plant.

...a battery big enough for long-haul trucks adds weight and size and cuts down on the total freight load the truck can deliver. And while an electric truck battery can take hours to recharge...

They should use smaller batteries and put a pantograph on the truck so it can recharge on the go.

Batteries will smooth out that graph.

The proposition authorized $10 billion in state bonds. The expectation was the feds would more or less match that.

The proposition authorized $9.95 billion in bonds, of which $9 billion would go to the HSR project. For every dollar the feds contributed, the state would contribute a dollar from that $9 billion, and once that $9 billion was used up, the project would need to find other sources to fund the remaining, including more federal, state, and/or private funding.

It's multiple times over budget

And thanks to inflation, the longer we take to build it, the more it will cost in the end. This is why it needs to get finished as quickly as possible. Build, baby, build!

the California HSR project is...unable to attract any private funding.

Not unable, just not ready to ask for private investment until the project is closer to completion. That was the plan from the very beginning: first get the government to pay for the bulk of construction, then get private investors to pay for the last little bit.

Once passengers have arrived at the train station somewhere in Nevada & found their way to Las Vegas, how are they going to get around there?

How do they get around when they fly there?

There's your answer.

Electricity is a major cost of desalination. So you're right, the question is whether it's cheaper to run the plant when electricity is expensive, such as during a demand response event, or idle it during that time.

0.3 out of 100 possible points doesn't seem like something that could elevate George W. Bush from an idiot to a genius.

But it's often enough to elevate a grade from a B+ to an A-.

We developed agriculture maybe 10,000 years ago, during a period considerably warmer then the present.

Our species survived past warming and cooling cycles because they happened slowly enough that we had plenty of time to adapt.

Obligatory xkcd.

A/C usage mostly coincides with PV generation. From sundown until about 9pm when people are arriving home and turning on their air conditioners is when California's renewables-heavy grid is stressed the most in the summer, but the state already have that short period covered. Adding EVs with bidirectional charging will only stabilize the grid even more.

China use slave labor, it's paid workers have little safety protection, and they have no real environmental laws.

The USA should quantify those subsidies, itemize and charge them as tariffs, and periodically re-calculate them. Then if (when) China wants those tariffs lowered, they will know exactly what they need to do. Until then, the tariffs will help keep the USA's automobile manufacturing healthy, unlike their domestic chip production that they neglected for many years.

It's not clear that using 3rd party ink broke the printer, only that the printer refused to print with the 3rd party ink installed. It's similar to the way videogame consoles refuse to run homebrew.

This is why we need laws that prohibit such arbitrary restrictions.