You're story is very interesting and all, but how about some actual numbers. According to department of Energy the EROI is 1-2.7 years. Yes, if you want to be of the grid you'd need batteries (though there's some good research on molten salt going on and of course gravity batteries have a proven track record), but for general usage solar could easily cover up to30-40% of energy needs (which are generally almost double during office hours).

If you want nukes. fine. I agree we need them at least for the immediate future and might need them for base load beyond, but their not the easy fix some people make them out to be. Their ROI, Energy or otherwise, is certainly not automatically better than some renewable systems. Nukes are very complex, very expensive, suffer from the cooling issue and require fairly massive mining and enrichment operations. Not to mention the decommissioning cost, which somehow never are factored in. And if you include refuelling and maintenance (plus the aforementioned lower power during hot summers or low river waters) their uptime is only around80-85%. Good but certainly not panacea their made out to be.

Portugal only generates 17% of the electricity it uses: http://energy.eu/#dependency So actually the 45% renewables is 45% of that 17%. Which is really, what, 8% of Portugal's consumed electricity?

Actually, if you look at the source you'll see that those figures are for total energy consumption inclusing oil and gas. Looking at electricity only the CIA worldfactbook states that Portugal generates 91% of the electricity it uses (well in 2007 anyway). And of course the introduction of electric cars would up the overal figure as well.

Pooh, not high tech enough? Last I looked, Asia was building over a hundred nukes. US is bringing up one that was mothballed decades ago. Europe, hmm, I think Italy just did a nuke deal with Russia? Otherwise, nothing. All stupid "green energy" stuff instead. Mostly, it takes more energy to make than it will produce over its lifetime. Asia is at least trying to have a future, even if Portugal is not.

Actually, they're building two next generation (well third generation pressurized water reactor) EPR reactors. One in France and one in Finland. Which is more than the US is doing so far. Those are, of course, late and vastly over budget, as almost all nuclear power plants are, but they are being built.

And to say that wind, tidal or solar power take more energy to construct than they produce over a lifetime is simply ridiculous. Even current photovoltaic, which is by far the most complex and involved to build, has a EROI of 2-4 years, with a 20 year lifespan (after which the cells are still produce energy, just at significantly lower power).

This is incorrect. Multibillion dollar payloads are more valuable than astronauts (though perhaps not more valuable than the costs of blame finding sessions after humans are lost on a launch vehicle). The need for reliability doesn't diminish when you don't put people on a flight. What is different is that humans require different handling, for example, more abort options (since a human can possibly be recovered from a failed flight, especially with some sort of crew escape system in place, while a multibillion dollar satellite can't, with our current technology) and a need for a lower acceleration and vibration environment.

You said ityourself. The PR disaster of killing astronauts far outweighs their "commercial value" (which seems a rather mercenary way to think about risk assessment to be honest). Just compare the effect of the two shuttle crashes (two long periods without launches while they made absolutely sure the problem was sorted out) with pretty much every failed launch of commercial rockets (back to launching in a few months at most). I explicitly used the Ariane 5 example since the Ariane 4 was a rather reliable rocket but because early in the development it was thought the Ariane 5 might be used for human launch, it was not good enough.

The Shuttle, for example, has a record worse than 99% survival of crew (in each case, the failure stemmed from a problem during launch) and that the crew of the Shuttle has the same survival rate as the orbiter and any payloads that the Shuttle is carrying.

True, however, the predicted failure rate was not 98,5%, the shuttle was designed to be safer. It should be noted that both disasters had more to do with operational failure at NASA than problems with the design itself. The Challenger launch should have been postponed after unusually cold weather while the original protocol stated that Colombia shouldn't have launched with the foam issue.

A good start would be the free release of postal code and mapping data by governments. After all this is information collected with public money, so it should be available to all citizens. The UK has or will release mapping and postcode data. But most countries still only allow the data to be sold for hefty prices. The most ridiculous part is that in some countries the postal code date is the property of privatized former monopolies.

One small counter to this is that manned space flight encourages vastly increased safety. If it's an (expensive) satellite 99% likelihood of success is fine, if it's a human the boundaries get pushed up. ESA's Ariane 5 rocket is an example. It was mostly designed with a possible human payload in mind. That's one of the reason's for it's excellent record (well after the first few launches :)

Seeing as when they compiled the bible, they packed together all of authoritative, trustworthy written documents that gave an account of Jesus' life or spoke of the man...

They didn't. They gathered together *all* stories they had and then picked the ones they liked. So at the very least there's a ton of writing which isn't in the bible. And academic researches generally assume that two of the gospels were written much later and were largely based on the other two (with some random additions).

If you are against all animal use: good for you (seriously, I have a lot of respect for people who are consistent about their principles, even when I disagree with them). But I highly doubt that all fervent anti-fur campaigners share that stantiment (and even when they do, they seem far more concerned with fur than with other usages).

Second concerning the standard of care for livestock animals; that may be true for the Us, but not world wide (at least the idea that fur animals are treated worse is a major point for anti-fur campaigns on this side of the pond).

Good point. Therefore you will be campaining to create a humane fur production, right? Larger cages, maybe even free range fur. The same standards for killing them off as there are for cattle, chickens etc.? Perhaps a better use of the meat?

(I agree that the way most fur is created/begotten is very inhumane. But I'm always puzzeled by the hard core campaigners against fur who insist is must be stopped completely)

I always wondered if the Cole bombing should be considered a terrorist attack. On the one hand the target was a legitimate military target on the other the goal certainly wasn't to reduce the capacity of the US navy, it was to strike fear.

(somewhat beside the point of the GP but I'm curious what the arguments are)