RDS is a $multibillion a quarter in earnings company. In the end, if they decide to gear towards a new product they need to be able to actually produce results.

Right now alt energy is an intriguing possibility that is largely dependent on public opinion and legislative action to make it financially viable. I.E. if the government does not attempt to quantify the externalities associated with brown power (pollution) and either tax the cost of the power to reflect the social cost of the pollution, or subsidize the creation of non-polluting generating resources, well then the economics aren't there. Should people in the future decide that they are, for instance, in a depression and paying 30% to 50% more for electricity than they "used to" before the pollution cost was realized, well maybe they wont care about global warming as much as they care about the "tax"... BOOM goes the renewable space.

So what is a huge company going to do? Spend their scarce resources to make it happen, or focus on the core, and things that will actually generate revenue that shows up in the annual report. The critic sites that they are pulling out of a 1000MW wind farm? Who cares? That may be the largest wind farm on the planet, but it is a tiny tiny project for a multination corporation. China alone brings on line a coal generating facility that produces more power than that every week. For the last two years.

This play is about scale, and cost effective carbon sequestration 1)is potentially has more environmental impact than all the wind and solar farms in the world put together, and 2) Is a huge potential market.

There is no simple solution to the complicated problem of global warming.

Personally I love DJ Shadow, but the tradition goes back way further than quantum in 1994, or the Beasty Boys tracks when Rick Rubin started going crazy in the production booth in 1984... Lee Scratch Perry was cranking out dub classics in like '72.

The interesting thing to me is that taking professionally made music and remixing it is still production work. fat boy slim was "making" music in his basement. Then he became a pop icon, and was pretty upfront about the fact that he never had the opportunity to be a sell out, since he was in it for the $$$ from the get go. This however, is an amateur taking other amateur work and collaboratively making rocking music, like out of love. Not just music eiter, but a cool syncopated video.

Truly, video killed the radio star, and the rise of the VJ may just be something new.
The big thing is that fat boy slim was able to secure the rights to his samples by cutting people into the royalties. For the right cut the rolling stones rolled over. This guy is taking individuals fully crediting them and mixing their work that they put up for free for people to see. Who is being harmed? This isn't about what are the labels going to do, but more what are the entertainment lawyers going to do when the labels never owned this stuff in the first place? Further, if you are posting yourself singing into a webcam I am assuming you aren't really litigious.

One last comment, to anybody who is concerned that this isn't musical enough... I am betting you have never see the sun rise after dancing like a freak for six hours to a dj who never actually touches an instrument. Maybe you should.

From GM's response:

"The bottom line is there isn't anything in this study that would change the decisions we made for the Chevy Volt. We think a plug-in offering 40 miles of gas- and emissions-free driving like the Volt is the sweet spot for the majority of customers because nearly 80 percent of drivers can drive their daily commute and return home for an overnight recharge that avoids inconvenience for them and additional daytime load on the electric grid."

The real bottom line is that this is a gimmick. The reason that GM has hitched their horsepower to the Volt is that they need to sell a story to potential investors in GM: in the future there is going to be a huge untapped wide open market for us to sell cars by exploiting people's desire to be green.

The fact is that they are correct that in the future the marginal cost of battery technology will come down. The dynamic of a cost effective solid state battery (the flavor du jur right now is lithium-ion, so we can use that as an example) works in general like this: the more the capital markets and specialty chemical companies believes that there is going to be a market for the composite materials that go into the batteries, the more they will retool and compete to bring those materials out to meet the expected market. Cheaper raw materials means cheaper batteries as an end product, self supporting the decision to build more infrastructure. Rinse repeat.

In GM's entire response, they never make any claims that these cars will be cost effective to the consumer simply that they can develop the technology profitably to them.
The entire analysis hinges on the pitch that burning less oil in your car is a good thing, but the vast majority of Americans will charge up their Volts by plugging them into a wall, and that electricity comes from burning coal or natural gas. I haven't done the analysis, but wouldn't be surprised that if you used the carbon offset benchmark that the marginal hydrocarbon burning associated with increased electricity demand would give you a net environmental result off just burning diesel in your commute.

When you add in the massive grid improvement that is going to be necessary to actually bring the electricity to power people's car to their houses reliably, then the value proposition to the consumer becomes even more shaky: a jump per kwh in retail electricity (needed to keep the utility companies profitable) is certainly going to eat into the marginal savings per mile driven.

It's the ethanol/ corn subsidy all over again.

I know that the environmentalists are going to flame me, and that the capitalists/libertarians are going to flame me, but as far as I am concerned the real bottom line is that if there is no simple solution to the complicated problem of global warming.