Its going to be decades before all the gas cars are off the roads, poor people cant afford new cars so they buy used, there isnt much of a used electric market out there right now.

Poor people are always screwed regardless. Helping poor people is therefore not a valid excuse for fucking up the planet more by delaying the spread of alternative fuels.

(Oh, by the way: my alternative fuel vehicle is 16 years old and would cost about $3,000 to buy today. It runs on something called BIODIESEL. Alleged unaffordability of alternative fuel vehicles isn't even a real thing anyway!)

But even more significant was the fact that they understood that civilization was riding on their backs, and so they were doing a job that must be done lest nuclear and renewable power companies take their profits.

FTFY.

Of course where it gets really interesting is if one of the projects pursuing various forms of hydrocarbon synthesis pays off.

Well shit, when you consider hydrocarbon synthesis (from CO2 or something, I assume) then sure, that solves the problem! If course, it's also irrelevant to the "peak oil" issue since you're not talking about non-renewable fossil fuels anymore. Saying that the "peak oil" is pushed into the future because of synthetic hydrocarbons is like saying it's pushed into the future because of nuclear -- it's evidence that somebody is smart enough to use a superior alternative, not evidence that continued drilling is somehow less harmful.

Maybe we should take your suggestion to its logical conclusion and simply stop drilling for oil entirely. Then "peak oil" will never even happen! Surely you'd agree that that's the best plan of all, since it's your idea.

Makes me wonder... not which side is right, but how they have together gained such a strangle hold on American politics without ever accomplishing much (or not much anymore, anyway).

It's an inherent flaw of our first-past-the-post election system, but gerrymandering, restrictive ballot access laws, and lax campaign finance rules helped.

What you are talking about is the very real pressure to "publish or perish". The fact is that those with better connections do get published and sited far more than the rest regardless of merit.

However, when scientists publish garbage, they can lose their credibility. You don't get a Nobel Prize for filling sheets of paper.

A good deal of offal pulled from the nether regions of highly paid media pundits and think tanks.The fact that some people suspect the average scientist MORE than people who MAKE A PROFIT from the exact topic they are disparaging tells me that someone spent their money well to make sure people are ignorant.

That isn't to say I don't process what I'm told from all sources with a healthy dose of skepticism and logic. But I don't swat at butterflies all day just in case they might attack. I think I can depend on butterflies and scientists more than bees and pundits.

I think that critical thinking skills are something that scientists cannot trust American citizens to have. We are lead to believe that someone would have around 16 years of higher education, and take a job that pays at least a third of what they could make with the math and technical skills if they became stock brokers or media pundits -- and they do all this so they can lie about a passion for seeking truth and knowledge. It shows a complete lack of empathy or understanding of human nature.

If I'm wanting to rip people off, I'll open a pay-day loan or a bank and charge bounce fees to poor people -- I don't need to waste time with difficult science to fudge a climate report in the desperate hope of getting a meager research grant.

The Crooks that own the media and hire think tanks to make every controversy like dealing with the Tobacco industry -- they are to blame. They are a cancer on society. We have to do something about these idle, useless rich people gaming the system to ruin it for everyone else. What, are they not able to afford a prostitute and enough steak to eat? These entitled parasites need to be shut down. We face a few existential crisis right now but we can't deal with Climate Change or the end of cheap labor (replaced by robots) because money owns politics and the media.

They do, but after taking 8 liters, they won't need it anymore.

I expect to hear mysterious reports from China of vampire attacks, as thousands of students inexplicably get 24 Credits and graduate. On the good news; blood shortage solved. The drained husks lying in the street won't be getting transfusions.

The entire goddamn point of science is that you prove the theory using experiment, publish a paper explaining what you did and how you did it, and then anybody else [who is competent] can go read the paper and reproduce similar results for themselves.

The real issue here is the part I put in square brackets as an aside: "anybody [who is competent]." It's true that if you're not competent then you need to trust something. But what you need to trust is not the individual scientists themselves, but rather that competent people will, as a group, follow the process and weed out the disproven theories.

Clearly, to defend against a weapons-grade laser you need a weapons-grade mirror!

Which is basically also the only way that any rebellion/revolution has managed to succeed in the past.

3D printing was the result of a lot of researchers working on a lot of parts, and when the dust settled, none of them could build a really practical printer without paying off all the other patent holders, most of whom were playing dog-in-the-manger with their patents while trying to elbow out the competition.

You see that with a lot of inventions. They may go through several cycles of invention / related invention / non-conbination / wait / patent expiration until enough necessary parts of the technology are patent-expired that the remaining necessary inventions can be assembled in a single company's product and the technology finally deployed.

Thermoacoustics, for instance, just had its second round of patent expiration and is in its third round of innovation. The basic idea is to make a reasonably efficient heat-engine and/or refrigerator (or a machine that combines, for instance, one of each) with no moving parts except a gas. Mechanical power in the form of high-energy sound inside a pipe is extracted from, or used to create, temperature differences.

There are some really nice gadgets coming out of it, built mainly out of plumbing comparable to automotive exhaust systems and tuned manifolds, maybe with some industrial-grade loudspeakers built in, or their miniaturized or micro-minaturized equivalent. (Example: A hunk of pluming with a gas burner, about 12 feet high and maybe eight feet on a side. Oil fields often produce LOTS natural gas in regions, like big deserts, where it's uneconomic to ship it to market. It gets burned off and vented. (CO2 is weaker greenhouse gas than CH4, by a factor of several). Pipe the gas into the plumbing, light the burner, and it burns part of it to get the power to cool and liquify the rest. As a liquid it's economic to ship and sell it. Then you get to use much of the otherwise wasted energy, displacing other fuel supples and reducing overall carbon emssion.

I hope this is the cycle where things hit the market.