The argument is nothing but irrelevant. It's not about energy but about cost. But even if we disregard cost - and disregard the energy cost in making the cars and their batteries, it would still be bogus.

As long as most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel, the energy gain is limited to the difference in efficiency between a ICE and the power plant. As electric cars are not 100% efficient either, the actual gain is even less. Factor in transport losses and energy foodprint in production and you are probably in the red.

First you have to come up with an electricity production infrastructure which can run 100% on nuclear and renewable at least some of the times, then you can reasonably have an e-car fleet up to a size to absorb the surplus capacity at those times. That is not unfeasible and will be unavoidable in the long run when fossil fuels become too expensive for mere energy production. But the US is not there yet - mostly because it currently makes no economic sense.

You can force things by subsiding wind and solar and levying huge taxes on gas and take the economic hit. In Germany, they took this to a point where they sometimes have situations where the price of electricity actually turns negative. In such a situation, e-cars which store the surplus would make sense - iff the German government would have bothered to put in the necessary smart grid infrastructure in place beforehand to allow for this (which of course they didn't).

ignatius

Ants, vermin, uninteresting, worthless - when for all we know we're the only game in town and most probably at the only interesting place in at least our Galaxy.

This is your usual ideological quasi-religious self-deprecation. "How dare you claim you are worth something in your own right? Don't you know that any worth only derives from being a good (insert any totalitarian ideology here)."

ignatius

police state indeed ...

ignatius

esp. for the taxpayer.

Insurance only makes sense for private entities to avoid bankruptcy or to save you standard of living. It's for losses one cannot afford to take so you're willing to pay a premium higher than the risk to cover yourself. For everyone else, insurance makes as much sense as for a billionaire playing the lottery.

The US has a federal budget of about 4.5 trillion $ and is (probably) the largest economic entity in the world. Buying insurance for 0.0025% of this would be plain stupid and an utter waste of money - esp. from a taxpayer perspective: we are talking about less than 50 cents per capita here.

Assuming that the scheme is even workable, which I doubt, it would be trivial to camouflage or disguise against it. It would just lead to more men wearing makeup.

Cities are constantly rebuilt. Its going on all the time and usually for quite unspectacular reasons ever since man made their first settlements. Most modern buildings are made to last a few decades and maintenance will exceed building costs in a similar time frame.

I am sure that in the US more urban areas get abandoned and new areas developed in a single year for economic, tax or fashion reasons than you would need to move due to rising sea levels in a century.

No idea. But if you fear e.g. that a specific place might get flooded a hundred years from now, then I suggest to build elsewhere (if you expect your building to last that long which is rare). If you are very sure of your convictions, then you can speculate and buy property on higher ground and make a fortune if you are right. And in the meantime, those who don't, will take advantage of the lowered coastal property prices.

Time will tell who is right and the price at any time will reflect prevalent convictions. And you get all that without spending a cent of public money. Isn't market economy great?

Also there, I take a more optimistic stance. If after the allotted time here of more than a billion years we haven't managed to spread out at least over our own galaxy, then we have failed as a species.

Of course, this only prolongs things. Eventually, thermodynamics will win. But that's OK. No point staying in the theater after the curtain has fallen.

Most actual misery is caused by overpopulation which has nothing to do with climate change. But by your own logic, we would then be best off to bring the warming behind us now, before even more people can be born to be affected.

It's certainly easier to cope with the necessary adaption with a pop of 8 billion than with 12 billion. It will still take a century or more, so the change will be slow enough for most people to not even notice. But even if you don't share my optimistic outlook, the best course of action would be the same.

Homo sapiens evolved and thrived in a climate considerably warmer than we have now (in the last interglacial 120.000 years ago, temperatures were several degrees higher than today), so the misery part is simply not plausible.

We have not caused the ice age and we certainly cannot change the mechanism which drive it. While I think that we can prevent warming if we put our mind to it, I see no reason to do so and it will certainly not work by trying to change CO2 levels, which are extremely low anyway and only a very small part of which is even man-made.

If we want to cool the earth, the only reliable way are orbital or L1 shades, which directly block energy input from the Sun. The technology is not there yet, but it can probably be done until the end of the century. It is certainly a cheaper and more realistic concept with better chances of success than establishing and running a global eco-dictatorship.

Tell us how ice ages are caused and which are the relevant mechanisms. Make a first-principal model which is able to compute the ice age and the galcials and interglacials from plausible starting conditions.

Because, if you cannot understand and predict ice ages (and we currently live in one), you cannot understand and predict climate. And with galcials we are talking 8 degrees temp. differences, kilometers of ice shields and over 100m of sea level. If we have no idea how they came about, do you really think we can with any accuracy or reliability predict effects which are an order of magnitude smaller? Should we bet the farm on it?

"tens of thousands of scientists over decades" just means that there is sufficient grant money to be had. It says nothing about the quality and nothing about the truth. There are (to the best of my knowledge) no first principal climate simulations out there (nor do I think that such are even possible given the host of feedback mechanisms, even for the abiotic part - add flora and all bets are off anyway). The models used have so many free tuning parameters that they can be made to predict essentially anything.

Not even that is the case. It will put us where we have been during the last interglacial 120.000 years ago, which was about 4 degrees warmer than today. And our ancestors not only survived but thrived - in Africa of all places and without air condition.

I for one welcome the arrival of our new life-sucking, negative head count overlords.

I totally agree that this whole "save the climate" thing is stupid and irrelevant. If we intend to stay around much longer, then we better get used to it. We will not stop the eventual return to normal. Nor should we try.

were invented. We are still in an ice age. The last comparable ice age was 300 Million years ago.

The normal temperature on earth is about 6 to 8 K warmer than it is now. Polar ice and extremely low CO2 levels like we have now are a rare exception geologically.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/All_palaeotemps_G2.svg/1400px-All_palaeotemps_G2.svg.png