747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC.

Off by a factor of two. The cruising speed is almost 500 knots.

I'm very suspicious of the idea of used battery packs being used for grid storage.

However, lithium is cheap and is well understood. I think Tesla could devote some of their production into non-cobalt based cells, and possibly non-nickel too, and use them for stationary storage.

The End? Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!

Unfortunately, we're near the end of the rainy season now. There's not much hope of an El Niño fixing the drought this year.

Isn't that plagiarism?

According to Wikipedia, Berserker was first by a year. I am more reminded of Laumer's Bolo series, anyhow.

If I had to pick an anime series I would have picked Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

That was a long series. I liked the first two-thirds of it or so, but in the end almost everyone dies to no real purpose. Kind of a downer.

FYI, a kilowatt is a unit of power, i.e. a rate of energy transfer per time. 21 kilowatts means you can move around 21,000 joules of energy per second.

A 'full charge' depends on the amount of total energy the battery can store, i.e. units of simply joules. Joules are pretty small and energy for batteries is often expressed as kilowatt-hours; 1000 watts * 3600 seconds = 1 kilowatt-hour = 3,600,000 joules.

So, 86 kilowatt-hours is about 310 million joules. If you charged a 86 kilowatt-hour battery with a 21 kilowatt power supply, it would take 86 / 21 = 4 hours to charge.

I was going to point this out, but Mister AC beat me to it. You rarely run a Tesla down to empty in a day of local driving. Also, most places in the US get between 5 and 6 hours of sunlight per day, although it can be much less in winter if you're anywhere near Canada.

More prosaically, and more accurately, I can predict the Sun will rise in the morning, or that it will be colder here in a month.

However the U.S. has the distinction as being the third most populous country, as well as the third largest in geographical size...

The USA is only the fourth largest country by area (Russia, Canada, China).

Aren't cows a leading cause of CO2?

No, that's methane. Any carbon dioxide cows produce will be transient. Methane will eventually decay to carbon dioxide, but it will take decades. Still, that's short enough that I don't particularly care about cows.

It's an academic problem.

True enough, and perhaps the scientists think so, but it's being reported as "...this will directly correlate to an exponential rise in the levels of atmospheric" carbon dioxide (from the article).

I don't think so.

How is this supposed to be a problem? The plants are sucking out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while they are growing, then releasing as they decay. It's interesting that it is noticeable, and bravo for measuring it, but I don't see any troubles that this will cause.

I can agree the gas tax needs to go up, particularly the federal one. Will congress agree? I doubt it.

Then the question becomes, what to do with all that tax money... :)

Everyone gets an equal share of it back. Trying to keep the government's hand out of it is the hardest part.

Gallium, indium, and tantalum are not rare earths. They are all much to rare for that.