Not according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. energy exports are only 43% of your imports. Crude exports are a mere 5% of your imports. The total amount of exports is also overstated because the U.S. imports crude oil from Canada, refines it and then exports it to other countries, thus inflating your export total as a percentage. So, America has a 5 million barrel a day deficit between imports and exports. Total U.S. production is about 8.7 million barrels a day, so you'd need to increase U.S. production by about 60% before you could become a net exporter of energy, which would put your production target at about 4 million barrels a day more than the U.S produced at it's previous peak production.

It has one advantage, it's cheap, and it's the preferred power source when coal isn't taxed (or more commonly where it's actually subsidized), because it's cheap. Additionaly, since most of the disadvantages are either invisible (for example, cancers caused by radioactive coal soot) or are somebody else's problem (like coal sludge dumped in someone else's water supply), those costs are not factored into the average user's decisions.

Actually, yes. Your solution may or may not be ideal, unfortunately, it has no relevance at all to what I was talking about. If you would like to comment on why your plan would be better for the poor than a tax refund, please do so. However, you neglected to provide any reasons why your solution would be actually be better for anyone, and since I was merely explaining how a carbon tax could actually be beneficial rather than detrimental to the poor people of America, your comment seems a little lost.

Assuming you're American, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that doesn't seem to have been true since the early 90s, it seems to mostly come from Canada recently (6.5 million barrels per month out of total imports of 7 million barrels).

That depends entirely on how you return the money. If you return the money as an income tax rate reduction, then yes, it will hurt the poor the most because they will spend the largest percentage of their income on the tax and receive virtually no tax relief (since they don't pay much income tax) and the vast majority of the benefit would go to the wealthiest eligible recipients (who pay the most the income tax and thus benefit the most from a rate reduction). On the other hand, if the money is divided equally and provided as a flat refund to each person, the poor will tend to get the most benefit from the refund because it will provide the largest percentage increase in their income/spending power. You should be able to agree that a $100 dollar refund is more meaningful to someone on a low fixed income than to someone with a million-dollar-a-year income.

It would help if they presented something new that even vaguely resembled science, rather than the same old tired innuendo and baseless accusations. I'm about ready to punch the next person who smugly claims that scientists don't know that the sun exists and that it warms the earth.

Are those pictures all supposed to be the same room? Because the rather large window from the first picture is clearly missing from the last picture.

Also, clearly a picture taken 10 days after she supposed fled her house, where she might be in that same house indicates that she never left it right? I mean it's not like she could have, say, left for a week and then returned in the space of 10 days? Right?

Clearly, this evidence is overwhelming proof of guilt, we should execute the victim immediately.

Perhaps, although it might be that making a reasonable comparison between transit options is better than making an unreasonable comparison. Someone who has a 5 minute commute from home to a workplace with ample parking is not an ideal candidate for most public transit solutions. Because the commute is so short, the amount of time spent waiting for the public transit tends to dwarf the regular commute time. Combined with a negligible parking cost, there would be little external incentive for anyone to go to the effort required to even consider changing their behaviour.

If it takes you 5 minutes to drive to work. Then walking or riding a bike would probably be a better solution than a bus.

From a system point of view, this seems like the opposite of what we should actually want. Journal articles exist to communicate the findings of an experiment, they actually have nearly no relevance to the public, nor should they. The results of a single article should not be trusted. It's a finding and it needs to be studied and replicated before it should be communicated to the public. So, I don't think we would ever want to force every scientist who is trying to get an article published to also draft a press release trumpeting the results of their study. Even honest scientists would constantly be tempted to embellish the significance of the results.

It seems to me, that we should actually want an independent science body who's sole job is to replicate significant experiments and confirm that the results are both legitimate and significant. Taking the advertising out of the hands of the original scientist should dramatically reduce the incentive to exaggerate findings and hopefully requiring the result to be verified first would deter all but the least reliable science journalists from writing wild articles based on never repeated experiments.

There would still be major problems, this organization would have to establish themselves as the trust authority for science questions. That would be no easy task. Additionally, there is the question of who would fund this organization. It should not be a single government, nor a single corporation, or even a single industry because of the potential for political interference.

You shouldn't forget that Toshiba was paying (or trying to pay) studios to switch to HD DVD. The Warner defection effectively ended the format war because Toshiba thought it had a deal where they would pay $100 million to Warner and $120 to Fox and they would both switch to HD-DVD exclusively. That deal would probably have fatally wounded Blu-Ray. However, you should know that after a slow start (plague by higher prices and hardware and software defects), by late 2007, Blu-Ray disks were outselling HD-DVD disks 2 to 1 overall. So it was Toshiba who needed to pull off a major victory and that's why they were offering money to both Fox and Warner to go exclusively HD-DVD.

To understand why things shook out as they did you have to understand that Warner probably didn't care which format won as long as one of them did. They were losing money because DVD sales were dropping but most customers were waiting to see which HD format would win. Warner, as the studio with the largest library of titles, figured it was losing the most money from the format war. I think when they evaluated the choices, they could see that going to HD-DVD wasn't going to end the format war, it was going to prolong it. That why they specified that Toshiba had to convince another major studio to defect. Warner wanted an immediate decisive victory. So, when the Fox deal fell through, Warner made their decision. So while they certainly took the money from Sony, they it wasn't the money from Sony that made them choose. And it's reasonably to believe them because 400 million is not that much compared to their estimated yearly profits (billions instead of millions) from their back library sales once the format war was over.

So, your narrative isn't entirely correct, the deal ended the format war decisively because Blu Ray was already winning, this back-room deal ended it in the direction it was already heading. That's not say that Sony wasn't desperate to win, but both sides were throwing money around and Sony was already winning.

Really? the article you linked says the opposite of what you claim:

Today many Christian denominations regard marriage as a sacrament, a sacred institution, or a covenant, but this wasn't the case before marriage was officially recognized as a sacrament at the 1184 Council of Verona. Before then, no specific ritual was prescribed for celebrating a marriage: "Marriage vows did not have to be exchanged in a church, nor was a priest's presence required. A couple could exchange consent anywhere, anytime."

I'm not sure a lot of Jews and Muslims would agree to that classification, but sure, they're all descended from the same god. But I guess that means Buddhists and Hindu are barred from marriage, instead?

Actually, it doesn't actually matter who you stand in front of, what you get is a marriage when you sign the piece of paper that the government issued you. You can go in front of a priest and say your vows, but if you don't sign the paper you're not married. Priests get no say in who marries and who doesn't, they can only choose to perform or refuse to perform a ceremony (of course, in so far as they own private property they are also allowed to deny use of such space for the same purposes).

Frankly, maintaining the registry of people who are legally married seems like exactly what the government should be doing. Maybe you want the damn government to keep it's hands off the legal system too?

Except you are 100% wrong, marriage predates the concept of Holy Matrimony which was introduced as a Catholic sacrament in 1184, we know that the earliest recorded marriage contracts are from around 660 BC. So that's over 1,800 years before it was associated with Christianity.

Then we are agreed, the government should not be enforcing a ban on same-sex marriages. Whether it's because you believe that everyone should be treated equally or because you don't think the government should be preventing the Episcopalians, the Unitarians, the Anglicans, and the Presbyterians (among many others) from performing same sex marriages, the end result is the same.

We've been down this road before, while you can take a civil institution (marriage), hang your religion on it, and claim you own it, it doesn't make it true.

Frankly, it's astonishing how often this profoundly ignorant line of argument comes up. What? Are you going to also declare that Jewish, Muslim and Atheist marriages shouldn't be allowed either? What about the other branches of Christianity that don't agree with you? Are you going to allow Catholics to get marriage? Protestants? What about the Christian churches that want to marry gay couples? Would you bar them because you disagree with their interpretation of the Bible? Why should we limit marriages to only the ones you specifically approve of, because some marriages don't confirm to your particular interpretation of a 2000 year old book?

According to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, that is most likely a consequence of Native Americans not having access to any arable staple crops. Once the option to grow corn for food became available, the Native Americans began settling down into cities. Unfortunately for the Native Americans the difficulty in acquiring a staple crop left them thousands of years behind the Europeans in their development and the subsequent exposure to European Germs wiped out the Native American cities. Somewhere around 95% of the city dwellers were wiped out during the initial contact with Europeans.

So that means that Native Americans had already discovered "economic development" when Europeans arrived, but the vast majority of those practising it were killed by simultaneous epidemics of smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis all introduced (at about the same time) to North America by Europeans.

Can you explain why you think the government should not be representative of the combined will of the voters?

Potentially, but that doesn't mean that's actually the proper reaction.

I'm am genuinely under the impression that they weren't, feel free to prove me wrong, but all of the credible commentary and discussion I've heard from experts on the topic indicate that Harper is running the most dictatorial and partisan government in living memory. Additionally, Stephen Harper is infamous for his micro-managing, his stage managed appearances and his defiance of the experts on virtually every topic. It's why this conservative government is just 2 for 45 on court challenges to their laws and has picked fights with just about every group that's not a conservative lobby group (and some that are).

Personally, I think you're using a false generalisation to dismiss valid criticism of Harper.

It seems like the problem with people like you is that you can't even imagine there being anything between two polarizing options. Either someone acts like a dictator or they do not. Is there no room for someone who only acts like a dictator some of the time? And shouldn't we prefer a politician who, when elected, spends as little time acting the dictator as possible?

I had high hopes for Harper when he was chosen to lead the Alliance party back in the day, but he's disappointed me at every turn since then.