You necessarily don't need lots of rare earth elements to make an electric car. Sure, when Toyota was designing the Prius in the mid 1990s, they chose to go with rare-earth magnets in their motors because they were the latest, fanciest, lightest magnets you could buy. On the other hand, Tesla Motors (and other companies) in the 2000s took a more cautious direction and built their propulsion motors without permanent magnets, therefore using no rare-earth elements there (the power windows probably still have rare-earth magnets, just like in every other modern car). Instead, Tesla Motors went back to the induction motor, originally invented by, you guessed it, Nikola Tesla in 1888. Rare earth problem solved.

References: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/induction_motors

If we pumped our own oil at the rate we are consuming oil, we would run out in ~10 years and then we'd either be out of oil or need to import ALL our oil instead of 2/3rds of it.

Last I looked, the plants in Japan survived the earthquake and aftershocks with no major damage. However, the fault lines in questions near Japan are in an offshore subduction zone and therefore produce tsunamis, which can cause major problems if systems are not designed properly. The fault lines near the California nuclear plants are slip faults and generally onshore, meaning they can no more produce a problematic tsunami than a wind farm. Also, the power plants in California were designed for an earthquake 15 times stronger than what geologists believe is the maximum possible earthquake locally (remember, since neither plant is on a fault line, the earthquake magnitude is not the local magnitude). On the other hand, nuclear power plants in the Midwest were built without earthquakes in mind and could suffer damage from geologically routine earthquakes in the region --- so I'll take earthquake-prepared California.

I have heard it argued by a realtor that solar panels do not increase the value of the home as buyers tend to underestimate the remaining lifetime of the product. Of course, that was anecdotal and not a study with stated error bars.

Yes, but China also has a lot of relatively inexpensive (but not quite cheap) skilled labor.

On the other hand, I don't see the US government using Chinese rockets unless there is no domestic supplier.

The CO2 plateau is so narrow on a geologic scale that it isn't often discussed. The apparent plateau you see on the right of the page you mentioned is in fact only a few pixels wide on the left and occurs naturally every 100,000 years. This link is somewhat more readable. I hope you don't view this as me ignoring the cause/effect so I'm going to be redundant: I think that the effect is historically normal, and the cause is the same historical cause of the last three jumps from 200 to 280 ppm, though I don't know exactly what that is.

What we've seen in the last 200 year has been an increase from 280 to 370 ppm, more than enough to end a glacial maximum, not to mention the other greenhouse gases like methane. Furthermore, the hockey stick graph is only a 1 dimensional picture. Scientists now have climate models with huge numbers of parameters; I've yet to see one that doesn't predict global warming in the next century due primarily to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Most environmentalists are trying to make some progress and would be ok with half the progress they think the world needs, as a step in the right direction. The oil and coal lobby is fighting against all compromise, because for them compromising is losing.

Since global warming is a negative externality of CO2 emissions, the free market will operate best if this cost is internalized -- so I advocate a gradually increasing CO2 tax so as not to shock the economy but to make it clear that the price of fossil fuels will go up. The entire proceeds can be spent on domestic research, solar panels for government buildings from domestic manufacturers, or even giving the proceeds back to the people in the form of tax credits.

Someday, a CO2 tax or cap and trade will happen. Global warming can only be denied for so long. Not too mention, someday we'll run out of fossil fuels (not literally, the prices will start spiking). Long-term smart money is in clean energy.

Actually, most of the "failed terrorist attacks" actually succeeded in making us scared. The "failed" shoe bomber means 800 million people annually now need to take off their shoes every time they go through security, taking a cumulative 760 man-years of time (assuming 30 seconds for on and off), of monetary value $67 million if you assume $10/hour value for the average person's time. The "failed" underwear bomber, now means 800 million domestic airline passengers annually need to be xray-screened, and costing us even more in (useless) machines, all for a bomb that probably cost $5.

I think we're wasting way more time and energy reacting to their past attempts than they are thinking of new ways to try to hurt us.

*800 million from http://www.numberof.net/number-of-airline-passengers-per-year/

Consider that buying a 1992 Honda means someone else can't...Honda can't decide to make more 1992 Hondas. Whereas buying a new Prius means Toyota makes one more Prius (approximately). Even if you sell your Prius every year to buy a new one, your old one isn't getting crushed -- someone else is buying it who instead might be buying a less fuel efficient car. Right now, you have to choose between fuel efficient (low energy upkeep) and reliable (initial energy cost being amortized over a longer time). But in 20 years, people will be choosing between a reliable Camry and a reliable Camry Hybrid.

2) The Prius / Volt gets 48mpg highway; the Golf TDI gets 41mpg. Thus, diesel is actually is less efficient than a hybrid. A base Prius is $23,560; a base Golf TDI is $23,709. So really, there is no way a Golf would recoup the extra cost since it gets worse gas mileage and in most parts of the country the gas is more expensive.

Also, isn't the LEAF supposed to debut at $33,000 - $7,500 federal = $25,500 before any state rebates (several of which are $5,000) the Leaf makes perfect sense if you are in a household that is or will be a two-car household. (If you charge it at night, it's about $0.08/kWh for PG&E customers -- in other states without tiers it's probably about $0.12/kWh.)

Most households only need one vehicle with a range of more than 100 miles, so it makes sense for multi-car families to have one or more electric vehicles and one car that takes gasoline, which could be a (plug-in) hybrid.

To the person who pointed out electricity is not free: the energy content of gasoline is 36.6kWh/gal (of which only a third does useful thermodynamic work) and has an average price of $2.75 (more in California) which works out to $0.23/kWh, so unless your utility doesn't offer cheaper electricity for EV charging at night (required in California) or doesn't have tiers (most of the rest of the country), electric will be cheaper to refuel, in addition to being cheaper to maintain.

I don't know where you got your numbers but I think they are grossly misleading. First, you compare electricity production to transportation consumption and ignore the efficiency only on one side. So, we use 28 exajoules of energy for transportation, but it only does about 7 exajoules of work so we would only need 7 exajoules of electricity to replace all oil for transportation. However, a lot of transportation energy is used by planes, which aren't really a candidate for electrification. And then there are trains, buses, and taxis which we could in theory electrify but aren't really talking about. And then there is light rail, most of which is already electric and is therefore in both categories just for confusion. In the end, by electrifying cars, I'm estimating that we're only talking about another 2 exajoules of electricity or so, replacing 8 exajoules of oil.

I chose to convert everything into useful energy, not consumed energy. You could do the opposite if you like but it's complicated because different power plants have different efficiencies and if we're talking about pollution how do you adjust the efficiencies of solar power plants since on one hand they are technically inefficient but on the other hand they don't use any fossil fuels? Anyway, gas-fired power plants where most of the immediate increased consumptions would probably come from are about 50% efficient so you could just use that number to get an approximate result of replacing 8 exajoules of oil with 4 exajoules of natural gas.

At least here in California, you must change to be on a time-of-use rate (either for the whole house or just the charging station) if you plan on refueling an EV on premises. That said, the time-of-use rate is cheaper at night and on weekends ($0.057/kWh), the slightly cheaper during normal times ($0.102/kWh), and only more expensive ($0.282/kWh) from 2-9pm on weekdays during the summer. Note that in California we have a tiered system and I was assuming one was in the lowest tier ($0.112/kWh) but if you're in a higher tier then you are likely already paying $0.22-$0.34/kWh.

Before you complain about over-regulating everything, it actually costs you less money given that you have a choice of moving your whole house to time-of-use or just the EV charger. If you play it safe and only put the EV charger on the time-of-use rate, you would only have to charge your EV four times as much at night as you do during the summer daytime for it to cost you more money if you went with the EV charger only option. This should be easy if you use your car to commute to work each day or generally don't drain your battery every morning and need to drain it again every evening.

What do you mean extremely poorly at under 90% of capacity? They run just fine at under 90% of capacity, it just doesn't save you any money whatsoever because you can't turn down the rate of putting new fuel in like you can with fossil fuel plants and even if you could the fuel is a negligible cost of the power plant, the majority being design, construction, and safety. You have to refuel every 18 months (or something like that) because the fuel doesn't burn evenly when you run under capacity so you can't really just replace the more burned fuel and if you wait to refuel the plant you'd end up refueling in the middle of summer which is obviously counterproductive.

11 million years, so we have about 16 million years to figure out what happens and then do something about it.