Of course, wind power only provides about 4% of the US electricity supply. And the eagle deaths are only the industry-reported ones. The study also excluded the well known eagle death trap - Altamont Pass in California - because its 60 eagle deaths per year swamp the rest.

The takeaway here is probably "be careful about siting". I doubt the massive wind farms in flat, rural Indiana kill many eagles.

See, Lamarck was just like Tesla - a genius ahead of his time! Darwin/Edison gets all the glory but finally science catches up to the genius of Lamarck/Tesla.

I predict Rube Goldberg is next - his designs just seem insanely complicated, but it will turn out that a mousetrap really is a required step in every mechanical process...

According to this pro-industry site, plastic bags are made from a waste product of refining natural gas. All the plastic bags made in a year take up less than a typical day's worth of petroleum use.

There's a couple of reasons:

1. Intrusiveness. The War on Terrorism hardly affects most people in their day-to-day lives - they have to take off their shoes at airports, nameless bureaucracies have computers read thru their humdrum emails and it was a very defined subset of Americans who were shipped off to war. The War on Carbon potentially affects everything because it makes day to day life so much more expensive and restricts normal consumer choice (you want a filament lightbulb? Too bad - buy a CFL! Don't like them for some reason? Buy an LED for 10x as much! Oh, and did we tell you that your yearly trip to Grandma in Arizona is killing the planet? Stop doing that!).

2. The sheer cost. Most mitigation schemes for global warming are in the ludicrous number range - trillions of dollars a year for 100 or more years. On top of that drag, most are designed to destroy economic growth (you almost have to in order to ratchet down energy use fast enough). This isn't a boo-hoo First World Problem - it's mostly a tragic Third World Problem. Germany gives up a few percentages of economic growth for 50 years - that's a hit (and the government would fall). Ethiopia gives up economic growth for 50 years and you're consigning millions to abject poverty and breeds radicalism.

3. The perception gap. The War on Terror seems to affect the rich and powerful in the same ways it affects the poor and the hoi-polloi - maybe a little less (they're rich!) but it seems somewhat similar. Even Mitt Romney has to take his shoes off at the airport. AGW mitigation, however, seems to be a problem that only the poor and middle class need to sacrifice for - Al Gore has numerous mansions, jets all over the world, uses more energy in a day than most families do in a week. AGW "solutions" seem to nicely dovetail with the natural desires of the elite - less upward mobility, pricier and/or more organic food, paternalism toward their lessers.

The optics on AGW are terrible - which is one reason there's such resistance. Killing bad guys, however expensive and destructive that may be, appeals to a lot of folks. If there were better optics - and a range of policy choices that didn't seem to favor the technocratic elite - you might not have such hostility.

We have a federal agency called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and Explosives). They all fall into the "barely legal and we'd really prefer you didn't have access to them" category. If marijuana ever becomes legal at a national level, they'll just move it from DEA jurisdiction to ATF.

I forget all the details at this point, but I remember that the Israelis had a huge number of similar greenhouses in Gaza - thousands of them - that were responsible for something like 15% of total Israeli agricultural output. Fresh vegetables grow well in greenhouses. (Taste may be a different matter...)

That's why I think it's far more ethical to be a carnivore - I only eat things that have a chance to run away.

(And this is Slashdot, so a reply of "Including your girlfriend?" doesn't apply...)

Humans aren't just descended from apes - we are apes. Anything that is part of Hominoidea is an ape (great or lesser).

Humans are technically great apes (Hominidae) - part of a family that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.

As long as they're both in salt water...

I've only had a chance to skim over the latest OECD document, but I went pretty far into the weeds on previous OECD documents on the same issues.

One thing that became very clear was that the US actually did quite well at educating second-generation or greater Americans - the numbers were quite high (as in top 3 in literacy) and even better at "highly proficient" (for category 4-5, the US was either 1 or 2 depending on how you sliced the numbers).

The core problem for the US that weighed on its average was the number of recent immigrants who were functionality illiterate in their original language and their children. The US has a very large recent immigrant population that is low-skilled and neither speaks English fluently nor reads adult level Spanish. The children of these immigrants typically score terribly and this significantly skews the US figures downward. I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but the percentage of first-generation low-skilled Hispanics (children) in the lowest quintile for reading was astronomically high.

Among second-generation Hispanic immigrants, literacy was actually slightly above average and then regressed back in subsequent generations.

Canada and many of the nations at the top of the list have fairly restrictive immigration policies - Canada uses primarily uses skill-based immigration (followed by family reunification). Recent Canadian immigrants and their children actually outperformed native Canadians on most tests. The high scoring Scandinavian countries had immigrant populations that were largely fellow Scandinavians (Norwegian Swedes, etc.). Japan has highly restrictive immigration policies.

Given that the difference between Canadian literacy and US literacy in the latest study is three points (273 vs 270), the entire difference is likely due to differences in immigrant population. It may even indicate that the US does a slightly better job as our low-skilled, low literacy immigrant population dwarfs yours.

(I'm not looking at these figures as an immigration restrictionist - they just need to be understood as part of the difference in outcomes. In a small sense, the US is increasing the literacy of the entire continent by educating the children of the Latin American diaspora.)

Which might give you a clue that your reputable news services may not always be completely neutral. (I'm not a huge fan of Fox News or the Examiner, but even they can occasionally break a story.)

Yeah, the Wikipedia grid of good/bad to private/common leaves a lot to be desired as both axes in real life are continuums and not binary choices. Even the heading of "common ownership" can be considered a flaw, as traditional Tragedy of the Commons is often modeled on open access resources rather than common ownership, which have subtle but real differences both in how they arise and the best ways to ameliorate their problems.

Classic case of The Tragedy of the Anticommons.

Of course, we'll get a bunch of comments on how this proves that business men are hypocrites because they are against regulation accept where it benefits them and how stupid the libertarians are.

But this is precisely the libertarian argument - if government becomes (overly) involved in business, rent seeking behavior is the natural result. Capitalism is a cruel mistress and businesses routinely fail, so they look for any edge they can get.

In a lightly regulated market with low barriers to entry, they have to compete on service, price, convenience, etc. In a more heavily regulated market, first movers and existing and heavily capitalized businesses look to create new barriers to entry to prevent competition and create artificial scarcity to keep prices high. This can be via licensing (taxis and beauticians), regulations that have high fixed costs but low per unit/worker costs, monopoly/captive markets like dealerships and liquor distribution, and other regulatory structures that that favor fewer, larger firms to more, smaller firms.

Ironically, the dealership structure began as a true capitalist trade-off - dealership networks allowed automobile companies to become large, centralized and efficient by helping to limit their capital costs - as inventory was created, it was immediately purchased and distributed across the country to local sources of capital. Car manufacturers got less money per vehicle but could concentrate their capital on plants, raw goods, workforces, etc. That dealership network absorbed a huge amount of the capital costs of the vehicles themselves. Once a lot of the manufacturers' fixed costs were paid off, the dealers saw the writing on the wall and used their local political connections to modify state laws everywhere to fix the existing model in place.

Playing devil's advocate for one minute, the summary is misleading when it says dealers are "working behind the scenes to change state laws". In fact, they are working in the open to preserve the existing state laws - Tesla was the company attempting to have various laws changed to their benefit (in the Texas case, to their sole benefit as it was very narrowly written). That said, I would prefer a more broadly written version of the "Tesla law" to prevail.