But you're wrong about your value assessment. Remember the model S is officially the safest car ever built. And yes price is less of a concern in the luxury market but it also is by far the most luxurious car there. Indeed it's the most advanced piece of automotive engineering in existence today. Electric cars do work better and drive cheaper. They work much better actually. They just aren't cheap enough yet but production scale will change that because mass production is always cheaper. Mass produced batteries will have a huge impact and that is partly why the power wall exists. Another marker for batteries helps ramp production up faster which makes the cars using them cheaper to buy. I didn't say they were ready to take over today. I said price cuts have already happened and will keep happening. Oh and btw the model S was by far the best selling car in it's class in 2013 and 2014. The other car makers certainly do worry. They are losing the luxury market tesla is betting they can do that in the middle class market as well. They are probably right.

Just like every other car since the model-T then.

Your example fails.
Electrical cars are already much cheaper than they were a few years ago. In fact every study has found the TCO of the Model-S is the lowest of any car in it's class. It's cash-price is currently at the top-end of the luxury-sedan class but it's TCO is way below anything else in the same price-range, you make a LOT back in saving on fuel and maintenance (maintenance on an electric car is much lower - even your brake pads last years longer because of regenerative breaking, and there are so many fewer mechanical parts that can wear out). There's a reason why BMW brought out the i8 for example, the other car companies can see the writing on the wall and are desperate to stay in the game.

They are also, once again, proving the futility of not being leaders anymore. While they are trying to build Model-S killers, Tesla is already seeing the Model-S as just the foot-in-the-door model, they are already working on both an economy car and an SUV model. Expect the same pattern on release, slightly more expensive cash-price when you first buy it, but a LOT more value for that money, and a lower TCO due to savings over time.

What you're describing right now is incredibly short-sighted, give it another 2 years and then you can start comparing. Based on current data, if electric cars are not the vast majority of the market in 10 years I would be incredibly surprised and I would say that for that to happen something else entirely we've not even seen yet would need to take over the market, it sure as hell won't be ICE's.
Trust me, ten years from now the only ICEs that may still be on the roads will be classic cars and long-haul heavy-load delivery trucks.

I would like to know why you think aluminum would make lithium obsolete ? Aluminum is more common and thus cheaper but everything I've read suggests it would be far worse as a battery source. What makes lithium such a good basis for a battery is that it has an atomic weight of just 3. It's the lightest natural metal on the periodic table. With such a small atomic weight - it's density is immense, you can pack a gazillion lithium atoms in a tiny volume. In fact the only things that you can pack more off in the same volume are helium (inert and so useless for batteries) and hydrogen (likewise not useful for batteries - at least the kinds we know now, and with a tendency to explode).
Lithium is metallic, highly reactive and incredibly dense. The more atoms you can pack, the more ions you have, the more charge your battery can hold without having to get bigger.

Aluminum has an atomic weight of 27 (rounded up for simplicity). Or to put it otherwise - to build an aluminum battery with the same charge-holding capacity as my cellphone it would have to weight 9 times as much or one the same size would run down in a 9th of the time.

The only potential I see for an advantage beside cost is that aluminum has a very low electrical resistance (topped pretty much only by gold) - but I doubt this is sufficient to compensate for the massive increase in mass.

Please do enlighten me, I'm not being sarcastic - but why do you believe aluminum would top lithium other than "we have LOTS of it, so much we can waste it making holders for soft drinks" ?

So give every other country some too. Ace neutered.

More that they are all equally evil. The winners just get to write the propaganda.

And the facts prove that luck was mostly good luck. There was no anger in my post your defensiveness is clouding your judgement .
My own country was a nuclear power. We gave it up voluntarily (we still generate electricity with it though). Dismantled our bombs.

I didn't ask more give a crap about whether the us is a good steward or not. I said countries should have equal rights. I said it's impossible for you or anybody else to ever have moral authority when you prohibit other countries from actions you still do yourself.
If owning nukes is legal for you its legal for Iran. If you don't think it should be legal for them then give up your own.

It's logically, morally and philosophically impossible for there a legitimate justification why the same country can own nukes and deny them to others.

And showing his ignorance further - most of the ice-sheet growth in the arctic is BAD news - and being caused BY global warming. Ant-arctic melt is adding fresh water to the ocean. Fresh water freezes more easily than salt water. The "growth" in the artic is a tiny fraction of the fresh water from ant-arctic ice-melt freezing over when it gets to the other pole. Most of it doesn't get that far, and it's a tiny thin layer of ice, the total ice volume is still massively down on both ends.

That isn't happening. It's not happening now. It's never happened with the EPA and this law won't make what isn't happening not happen in future because this law has fuck-all to do with that.
What you just quoted is the propaganda story republicans are telling to justify this completely insane law. It has fuck-all to do with the actual purpose or content of the law.

You've been lied to.

Right... let's see how hard the republican senators fight the fight when the effect would be to bankrupt and big pharma, and indeed, make it completely impossible to ever again develop or sell a drug in the United States.

>So then, forcing the EPA to base that decision on publicly available science (actual peer reviewed papers and such), is fine then, right?

Which is what they are doing.
This law doesn't say what you think it says. You're an idiot for believing what republicans tell you their laws say.

If this law was saying that, and that wasn't ALREADY what was happening, then the scientists of America would be applauding the law. But instead all of the science organisations who have spoken out have DENOUNCED the law. They call it stifling research and banning perfectly legitimate science from consideration.

They are telling you the law does NOT say that. Republicans are telling VOTERS it says that, but it's NOT what it says and what you think it demands is the law already, RIGHT NOW.
What this law is about has nothing to do with what you think it is about.

And if anybody doubts it you can point out that with the establishment of the confederacy all states joining it had to sign the declaration of confederacy, an agreement under which it would operate. The declaration of confederacy does in fact explicitly mention slavery, in fact it's mention of it makes up most of the damn document.
What does it say about slavery ?

That if you join the confederacy you must promise that you will never in any way, shape or form ban slavery, regulate slavery or interfere with people's slave-owning in any way by passing any laws except those that protect slave-owners. With a long list of things you can and cannot legislate around slavery. In short, you weren't ALLOWED to join the confederacy unless your state was willing to promise that it would never, in all eternity, end slavery.

>It's people like you who are the reason these reports come out saying people in the US have an abysmal knowledge of history.

What did you expect. Republicans support republican politicians -even AFTER they recently proved that the foreign minister of Iran knows the US constitution (and it's definition of treason and the laws passed based on that definition) better than the republicans in the Senate do.

And if ever you needed proof that congress is now a law unto themselves... had ANY citizens written that letter about the Iran negotiations they would have been sent to jail for three years for treason. The SOLE reason the writers of THIS letter aren't being prosecuted right now is that they are senators - the law does not make an exception for Senators (in fact - exactly the opposite), they just (correctly) assumed that the police and prosecutors would.

So are you surprized when Republican voters who shout constitution all the time turn out to have no idea what is in it or what it means ? Of course not, the senators they elect don't even know it !

>That being said, what exactly is your problem with requiring all information the EPA uses to set policies be open to the public and able to survive scientific scrutiny?

Nobody has ANY problem with that. Including senate democrats and the president and almost every scientific organisation in the USA who ALL oppose this bill... So why do they oppose the bill then ? Did it ever occur to you that maybe the bill isn't about what the republicans say it's about ?

What it's ACTUALLY about is that the reps are desperate to prevent regulations around air pollution and climate change. The trouble is the scientific data to support such regulations are overwhelming. So they are trying to exclude huge swaths of completely legitimate science from consideration. Specifically any science that has any part of it's data covered by patient privilege. That would be just about every large public health study ever done.

What they want to do is to stop the EPA from using the exact same, perfectly legitimate, science that is used daily by biologists, pharmaceutical companies and more.
Don't you find it odd that this is limited to the EPA while so many others use the same studies, including the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry ? Surely if the EPA cannot regulate something based on these studies then big pharma shouldn't be able to get a drug approved based on them, and the FDA shouldn't be allowing approvals based on studies like this.
Studies which are ALSO covered by patient privilege make up almost the entirety of biomedical research, it's just a fact of life when you're dealing with studies involving people.
Why are they legitimate science when Bayer uses them but NOT when the EPA uses them ?

I'll tell you why: because Bayer is a campaign contributor and the EPA is somebody that pisses campaign contributors off.

The science involved is all perfectly legitimate and in line with the scientific method. The "secret science" name is a propaganda term with no real truth to it intended to disguise what wall street's representatives are trying to really do.

A new field of study ? Geologists had confirmed this decades ago. In fact, it's the ONLY possible explanation for why the sea is salty. CO2 from the early atmosphere was dissolved in the ocean, which turned it acidic, which then reacted with metals in rocks releasing minerals like salt into the ocean. If Ocean acidification from CO2 in the atmosphere is not as fact as anything in science can ever be - then the oceans water is fresh. Go taste some. I'll wait.