In addition to what ColdWetDog said, I want point out a *positive* feedback loop: decreased albedo. Ice is white and reflective. It reflects most of the sunshine back into space. Water is dark and absorbent. It absorbs most of the sunlight, which leads to greater heating, more ice melting, etc. Positive feedback loop.

> Then you've never looked at the income of the Federal government before and after tax breaks. It almost invariably goes up.

uhhmm... bullshit. Please provide a reference to back up that statement.

Existing grid can *already* support converting 70% of all the cars to electric, provided that they all charge at night. You really do not appreciate the difference in power usage difference between day and night. Build more power plants & transmission lines and you can get that number even higher. The article is a troll, btw.

reddit.com. It's what slashdot should have been.

Glorious nation of Kazakhstan has the best internets.

All other countries have inferior internets.

... but jizzle was already taken.

> But the Saudi's have a lot of heavy oil that at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel wouldn't be economically viable, but at 100 bucks a barrel, with bangladeshi slave.. I'm sorry, foreign worker, labour becomes reasonably profitable.

Not necessarily. Not if extracting that oil results in a net energy loss.

See, we extract oil to get energy out of it (well, among other things, but let's simplify here). But the extraction process itself takes energy. If you spend more energy than you get out of it, then the process will never be profitable. You talk about certain oil reserves being profitable at 100/barrel. But you are assuming today's energy prices. As the energy prices increase, the break-even point for those reserves will also increase. Some reserves will become profitable but some will be forever too expensive to bother.

Let me give you a practical example. Canada has 1/3 of the world's oil reserves. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those reserves are in the form of tar sands. You can't just pump the oil out of tar sands. You need to use steam extraction.

Here is how it works. First they strip the top layer of vegetation to get to the tar sands. Then they use natural gas to boil water and then use the steam to extract oil out of tar sands. The contaminated oily water is then dumped into massive reservoirs called tailings ponds, where it continuously kills wildlife.

To extract 3 barrels of oil out of tar sands you need to spend the equivalent of 2 barrels worth of energy. Oh and you also have to contaminate 15 barrels of fresh water. So the process is energy-positive, but the environmental damage is enormous.

> If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way.

Actually, huge gain. OPEC quotas for each country are limited by the amount of proven oil reserves (i.e. the more oil reserves a country has, the more oil it can export, according to OPEC rules). Therefore, it is in each OPEC country's interest to overstate their reserves to artificially increase their quota. The fact that Saudis, as well as every other OPEC country, has been overstating their reserves has been an open secret for the past couple decades. In the case of Saudis, it matters more because their reserves are (still) the largest.

Peak oil is already here. Two of the predictions came to pass:

1. Peak discovery, i.e. fewer new oil reserves are discovered than existing ones put in production. Happened in the 70's.
2. Peak production. Despite growing demand, production of existing fields cannot be increased. Happened in 2008.
3. Long tail of falling production and rising prices. We were "saved" from this by the economic downturn. For now. Once world economies start to pick up, oil prices will go through the roof.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaW4Ol3_M1o

http://blip.tv/file/2204956

The spinal needle goes up to 11 (inches).

Hate to reply to myself, but here is what I mean:

"Long-term depreciation and resale values remain unknown so are assumed to be neutral."

(from the pdf).

Here is the actual study (took a few clicks to find it):
http://www.bcaa.com/downloads/BCAA_Hybrid_Cost_Analysis_2010.pdf

A car lasts a lot longer than 5 years. If you want to calculate the cost over 5 years you'll need to subtract the resale value of the car, which will be higher for a hybrid. It doesn't appear they've done that.

While I agree that cost savings of a hybrid vehicle are overblown, this study is misleading. Also, another benefit of buying a hybrid vehicle was that until recently you could drive one in a commuter lane (in California at least), even without a passanger.

this was the same reason that alcohol prohibition was repealed. US was in the middle of great depression at the time.

There was a company called Rapid Mind, which built library & tools for writing code to target various GPUs, multi-core CPUs, etc. Something similar OpenCL, I suppose, but easier to program (theoretically -- I never actually tried it). Intel bought it and killed it.

Another company, Havok, developed a successful physics & AI library. They were going to port it to to GPUs. Then Intel bought it and canceled the GPU port.

This involves a lot of uhh... manual labour. Would his hand get tired?