EVs don't need to be half the cars on the road yet. Not even 1/4.

It's true -- if the median is near the mean, the 47 mile range leaf won't work for a big chunk of commuters (who can't charge at work, and have sufficiently large commutes). But even the most popular car on the road only makes up a few percent of the cars on the road. If EVs only work for half the commuters, and if each two-car-household would only buy one EV (so they can drive to grandmas this week), that's still 1/4 of all cars on the road. Sure, that's an upper bound since not every household is a two-car-household, but surely 1-in-10 could easily incorporate an EV with the leaf's range into their two-car-household.

If 10% of cars were EVs, that would be a substantial number, and it would result in dramatically improved infrastructure, lower prices, and improved R&D. That they don't work for everyone doesn't mean there's not a sizable market. See: SUVs, sports cars, minivans, economy cars, etc.

And personally, I agree with you about mountain cabins, be they of the 800 or 8000 square foot variety. And, in fact, the Dept of the Interior et al do let plenty of wildfires burn out.

That written, cities are the natural habitat of mankind, and we do have an obligation to protect more urban settings.

The collective PM from wood burning stoves is significant in some parts of the country. The EPA has air regs on all kinds of combustion, from large coal power plants down to, well, wood burning stoves and fireplaces. Heck, in some parts of the country dirt roads are a major source of air pollution.

I'm not going to be your monkey and look up the citations -- but I'd bet if you're really interested, you could find 'em.

Most coal fired power plants are illegal by EPA standards today. Very few buildings in America's inventory would comply with 2013 building codes or zoning regulations.

Wood burning stoves emit pollutants that we all breathe. The EPA already regulates wood stoves. As technology has improved, they've ratcheted up the standards, just like they do with lots of regulations.

The *cost* of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is way, way too high to do this. Even with cool tech, you've got to build the power plant right next to the sequestration site -- which means getting the fuel to the site -- which means building right of way, pipelines or rail, etc. Transmission lines too. Then you take the performance hit in the generation to run the sequestration equipment.

It's cheaper to build big wind in the breadbasket, lesser wind offshore, solar on roofs and in the southwest, bits of biomass and geothermal where it works, and use transmission to move it around. What about no sun or wind? Well, it's windy or sunny someplace nearly all the time in tUSA, but yes we'd have to use our ~21GW of pumped hydro storage differently, maybe build more, maybe use electric vehicles (EVs) for storage, maybe upgrade our infrastructure to change when we demand electricity [run electric hot water heater, air source heat pumps extra when flush with renewable generation so that we use them less when we'd be short]. All of that is way cheaper than CCS, and as a bonus it won't leak the carbon later, it doesn't require creating mini earthquakes, chopping off the tops of mines, figuring out what to do with the ash, the SOx, the NOx, the Hg, and other pollutants, the nuclear waste, how to deal with water shortage or water temperature problems, and on and on and on.

Look, I've been on slashdot 15 years or so. I know the community believes in nuclear power. The answer to CCS is the same as nuclear: it's too expensive. You can argue breeder or reprocessing or any number of other things, but the age of cheap gas has killed any nuclear renaissance, and the age of plentiful cheap wind in the breadbasket, plentiful expensive wind on the coasts [where electricity is expensive anyway], and plummeting PV costs means that nuclear and coal are dead for economic reasons, it's just a matter of time.

(footnotes) I didn't bother to provide links, but you might check out "2012 Wind Technologies Market Report," the economics behind the closures of Vermont Yankee and Kewaunee, "Analysis of Drought Impacts on Electricity Production in the Western and Texas Interconnections of the United States," the recent output reductions at Pilgrim and Millstone nuclear plants due to the Cape Cod Bay and Long Island Sound water too hot for cooling, how Xcel Colorado electric utility is procuring 450 of MWs of wind and 170 MW of solar because it's cheaper than gas, coal, or nuclear, and on and on and on. We built loads of coal in the 50s and 60s, nuclear in the 70s and 80s, combined cycle natural gas units in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now those will operate until retire, while being replaced with wind, solar, some new gas, and energy efficiency. Know why? It's the cheapest way to do things. CCS (and nuclear) aren't, not by a long shot. There's no reason to think that they will be, either.

The VT legislature passed a tax on all large power plants in the state built post July 1965, to the tune of $0.0025-per-kilowatt-hour.

Vermont has about a half dozen oil-fired peaking plants (some may also be able to run on gas), each under 50 MW. 80-something hydro dams, most under 10 MW. Since Vermont has just under 200 MW of total hydro power, no dam is 200+ MW. Vermont has no coal-fired power plants, nor stand-alone gas plants. No biomass, solar, nor wind projects are anywhere near 200 MW in size. As far as I can tell, there is no 200 MW power plant in Vermont that has pre-1966 vintage, so I don't know why the construction date is in the law at all.

Strictly speaking, the law did not single out Vermont Yankee. It applied to all power plants of significant size. Vermont Yankee is the only plant that fits that description, though any new power plant 200MW+ built in Vermont would also pay that tax.

I submitted the post (yesterday). Any chance I can get some +1s for the "excellent summary" I provided?

(yeah, karma whoring, I confess)

Sao Paulo: 18,690/sq mi
NYC: 27,550/sq mi

Keep in mind that the denominator is "land" in the city, not total area -- this brings NYC down from almost 500 sq miles to just more than 300 sq miles.

Source: wikipedia

Federal gas tax roughly covers federal expenditures on roads
State gas tax does not cover the entire state expenditure on roads
The local government's expenditure on roads -- covered by property tax.

In my town of ~60,000 people, we spend ~$3M/yr on roads. Not one dime comes from motorists per se. It comes from property tax.

Cyclists do pay for local roads via property tax, pay for some of state roads via income or state property tax (and some state roads prohibit bicycles) and you won't cyclists on interstates.

If the owner is working in the store most days, and we're talking about a (relatively) small amount of cash, a few reasons:
1. The "cost" to handle the cash onsite is really low. The owner has plenty of time throughout the day when customers aren't in the shop to count it, bundle it, etc.
2. The owner may well drive past the bank every night anyway. A night drop isn't particularly difficult nor dangerous.
3. Cash allows the owner to sell things off the books. Sure, it ain't legal, but don't think that it doesn't happen. Owner sells a $50 bottle of booze in cash, money goes in pocket, bottle gets marked down in inventory as dropped and broken.

It's expensive for a large store to handle cash, but a mom and pop, especially a slow moving retail store? It's quite cheap and provides a number of, shall we say, extralegal opportunities for the owner.

P.S. One necessary part of cash is having enough change -- $1 bills and coin. For this reason alone, I just don't understand why mom and pop shops don't make sure that their prices, plus sales tax (not included in the sticker price in tUSA) don't result in a flat dollar amount, or at least be penny-free. It's exceedingly rare, and I've never understood why. Are people really fooled to thinking that $9.99 is more like $9 then $10?

Canada has a lot of cheap electricity because it has a lot of hydropower. Loosely speaking, hydroelectric dams don't generate CO2 -- and if Canada continues to develop more hydro dams in and around Quebec, and if Canada converts a substantial of its vehicles (even just those in urban areas) to electric powered, Canada could continue to drive it's carbon footprint per capita down despite it's substantial agriculture and heavy industries.

If, however, it keeps pushing the development of the Alberta tar sands, then it's not the fault of the farmers for Canada's large carbon footprint, at least not directly.

Without a political call exemption, the law would have been thrown out under the First Amendment of the Constitution. You know,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Don't like it? Amend the US Constitution. Good luck with that.

Does this mean that children raised by gay men are more likely to wear dunce caps and children raised by lesbians could have super brains?

They're both similar.

Both nuclear and coal are obligated to clean up their own site upon retirement. In the case of nuclear, there are typically trust funds established. In the case of coal, differing states have differing requirements, but site remediation is typically part of the requirements.

Now, for off-site pollution, neither coal nor nuclear are responsible for their own mess. Coal plants emit SO2, NOx, CO2, Hg, PM2.5, PM10, and other effluents and pollutants, and once it's out of the smoke stack, it's somebody else's problem. Nuclear plants typically emit very little more than water, but when they do, the US Government is on the hook, not the owner of the plant. It turns out that the United States Government is the sole insurer for catastrophic nuclear accidents in the United States. Yip, that would be the 300 million of "us", not the owner of the plant. It's not a coincidence that nuclear plants in the US are often (always?) LLC corporations, so that the parent company (in this case, Dominion) can walk away from a financial disaster even more easily.