At my work, we recently had a workshop on how technical folks can better present ideas when trying to get funding. Here are a few of the take away points that might help you:
1) Don't focus too much on the technical details.
2) Know your competition and be able to explain why your idea will work better.
3) Practice your pitch beforehand, and solicit feedback on how to make it better.

One recommended method for getting feedback was to grab a small group and ask them to pretend to be investors. Have a few of them focus on what parts of the presentation worked well and shouldn't be changed. Have others focus on what parts of the presentation had problems. When getting the feedback, just take notes but don't try and respond immediately to the feedback. Do this a few times and your pitch will get significantly better. You may end up feeling like a used car salesman at the end of the day. But if you're going to sell your idea, you need to be able to wear that hat for a day.

It might be better to start with the Kalamazoo River oil spill in 2010 as a baseline for an estimate. There a 30 inch pipeline ruptured and released 819,000 gallons of oil. It does prove the point that not nearly as much oil will be released. For perspective this is on the order of 100 tanker trucks worth. But at the same time, it's still a lot.

What worries me is what happens to a small leak over time. Sure the segment in Washington can find an 8% leak in 15 minutes, but what about a 2% leak? Additionally, I suspect the leak detection equipment will only be good enough to meet the requirements of the state the segment it's protecting resides in.

Some of your decisions we loved. Some of your decisions we hated. Some of your visions didn't pan out, others changed the world. Regardless of our personal beliefs, few can disagree that you had a profound effect on the technological world.

I only wish you had more time to spend with your friends and family. Our hearts go out to them in their time of loss. And our minds will continue to build upon the foundation you helped lay.

RIP

At the same time the article states that they achieved >400 passenger miles per gallon. Additionally, if you check the rules, they were also required to carry 200 lbs per seat in the plane. (17 http://cafefoundation.org/v2/pdf_GFC/GFC.TA.07.28.09.pdf ) I'm actually more impressed that they were able to pull this off with a decent carrying capacity.

When I was on a plan with a similar price bracket, the deductible was also per incident. Thus your friend would would have been charged the $1,500 each time until he hit the much higher yearly limit (mine was $10k). Also to bring down the prices of these plans, they tend to have separate deductibles for hospital, medication, and preventative care.

Also to the GP, you're really identifying the missing option #8) Pay for emergency only coverage. I believe the older post's "Pay it yourself" was referring to paying for all care without the help of insurance.

I had been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and at least try it out before forming an opinion. Then I read the following:

User studies can be informative, but in this area, we're really interested how experienced users work with a lot of windows, so the most basic approach of paying people off the street to sit in front of of a computer for an hour to do predesigned tasks wasn't going tell us much. - GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released