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There is a fucking HURRICANE coming, why are we wasting time with this? This storm will be a Cat 5 blasting into the Carolinas with the force of thousands of nuclear bombs. Are there nuclear power plants that need to be secured? Chemical facilities? Low lying areas where people live, barrier islands, etc? Can we get started early on recovery planning, such as food, water, body bags, sanitation, etc? We shouldn't forget about the animals - we have a good amount of warning that we could be using to evacuate animals as well as people. We should take this as a call to action to accelerate global climate change amelioration efforts and a rapid transition to renewable and carbon-neutral energy as it is obvious to everyone that this monster storm is a direct result of global warming and is only the first of several pointed right at the US like bullets in the barrel of a gun. Up until now, much of the damage due to global climate change has been in faraway places like low-lying islands in the Pacific - this is climate change writ large, come home to roost. We all know that the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere probably cannot be removed, but the least we can do is make a serious attempt to cut back on new emissions and we can and do have the technology to do it, we simply need to find the willpower. What we do NOT need is imbeciles like the current occupants of the White House doing things like this to actively make the problem worse but put a few extra pennies in the pockets of their big oil campaign contributors. This hurricane, which promises to be ultra-destructive as it barrels towards landfall and then stalls out over the coast due to changed weather and climate patterns needs to serve as a clarion call to arms for all climate warriors to remove by any and all means necessary, even force, people who are trying to destroy our world and our children's world. The time for action has come, and the time for discussion is over. We have tried reason and it has not worked because they will not listen. Nobody can say we didn't try.

I'm gonna study this paragraph and break out all your points into actionable line items and prepare for its arrival and shit the hurricane's up by Idaho already.

There is a fucking HURRICANE coming, why are we wasting time with this? This storm will be a Cat 5 blasting into the Carolinas with the force of thousands of nuclear bombs. Are there nuclear power plants that need to be secured? Chemical facilities? Low lying areas where people live, barrier islands, etc? Can we get started early on recovery planning, such as food, water, body bags, sanitation, etc? We shouldn't forget about the animals - we have a good amount of warning that we could be using to evacuate animals as well as people. We should take this as a call to action to accelerate global climate change amelioration efforts and a rapid transition to renewable and carbon-neutral energy as it is obvious to everyone that this monster storm is a direct result of global warming and is only the first of several pointed right at the US like bullets in the barrel of a gun. Up until now, much of the damage due to global climate change has been in faraway places like low-lying islands in the Pacific - this is climate change writ large, come home to roost. We all know that the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere probably cannot be removed, but the least we can do is make a serious attempt to cut back on new emissions and we can and do have the technology to do it, we simply need to find the willpower. What we do NOT need is imbeciles like the current occupants of the White House doing things like this to actively make the problem worse but put a few extra pennies in the pockets of their big oil campaign contributors. This hurricane, which promises to be ultra-destructive as it barrels towards landfall and then stalls out over the coast due to changed weather and climate patterns needs to serve as a clarion call to arms for all climate warriors to remove by any and all means necessary, even force, people who are trying to destroy our world and our children's world. The time for action has come, and the time for discussion is over. We have tried reason and it has not worked because they will not listen. Nobody can say we didn't try.

Citing inside climate news is like citing the daily mail.

There's any number of sites that have the memo on them. I cited those two because they have the actual scan of the memo on them, not merely the text file, and added the New York Times article, as a mainstream media source, but if you don't like those, I can send you a few dozen other links to the file. Or you could just google it.

By the way, everything you're accusing Exxon of is actually what a group of environmentalists and plaintiff's lawyers decided to do,

I gave a citation and links to three different sources. Where is yours?

Ah, you don't have a citation, you're making that up. Right. That's a trick right out of Göbbels, that "the cleverest trick used in propaganda" is to accuse your enemies of what you yourself are doing.

with funding by various Rockefeller foundations (among others). The main people that would benefit from this case being successful would be the class action attorneys, who would stand to make hundreds of millions if not billions.

Have you fully thought about the fact that the fossil fuel industry is a trillion dollar industry? Mere "hundreds of millions" is less than penny ante to them.

Who is more likely to fund a campaign, an industry that has a trillion dollars at stake, or some random collection of lawyers who say wait, maybe if we believe the science, some time in the far distant future some laws might or might not get written that might or might not allow a new grounds for lawsuit? Oh, wait, we know the answer to that, because we already have the American Petroleum Institute memo laying out their campaign and asking for 2 million dollars in funding... for the first year.

Yes, that's right-- the API considered this so important that they could ask fossil fuel companies to contribute a whopping 0.0002% of their cash flow to deal with it.

What happens when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, does a coal plant gets shut down? No. What happen is that the typical home customer has its share of green power reduced from say, 4% to 3%. The production remains the same. What matters is the total emissions of the country, divided by its population. The US continue to be one of the worst.

Yes, coal plants do get shut down. US utilities have plans to close 40 coal power plants over the next four years. These plants are primarily shut down because of competition with natural gas and renewal energy. So when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, that is 1 GW less that coal power plants are making in revenue. That causes power plants to be shut down.

US residential electricity sales have been going down since 2010 in both total figures and per capita figures. This is both because of energy efficiency improvements and cheaper forms of energy production. US carbon emissions are going down because of these trends.

Old news, it is from almost two months ago. http://www.eenews.net/climatew...

It's not just the government taking steps. A coalition of companies is joining together to stockpile power plant transformers (which normally have a long lead time, and last I read there weren't any US manufacturers the largest such transformers), among other high voltage bottleneck equipment.

Utilities are loving the sound of this increased government focus on hardening the grid. I wonder how much of this is to help struggling utilities. It should have been done long ago nonetheless, but I'm guessing some lobbying has helped push this along.

Hey look, in other news, the largest solar install is proving unworkable:

Here’s the story so far. Ivanpah:
- is owned by Google, NRG Energy, and Brightsource, who have a market cap in excess of $500 billion.
- received $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy.
- is paid four to five times as much per megawatt-hour as natural gas-powered plants.
- is paid two to three times as much per megawatt-hour as other solar power producers.
- has burned thousands of birds to death.
- has delayed loan repayments.
- is seeking over $500 million in grants to help pay off the guaranteed loans.
- burns natural gas for 4.5 hours each morning to get its mojo going.

Source: http://dailysignal.com/2016/03...

"I didn't know that Honduras prohibited transporting lobsters in clear containers, rather than opaque ones." That's not at all ridiculous. And someone was convicted for that and sentenced to jail.

Or not so much? The other side of the story is that the case was based on under-sized lobsters (i.e. overfishing), not the packaging. Sounds like one of those fables cooked up by dishonest right wingers to be repeated in spite of the facts. Like Clinton being responsible for Ruby Ridge (happened before he was elected president much less took office) or banning DDT from agricultural use causing millions of people to die from malaria.

• Prosecutors insist the packaging issue is misleading at best, in part because the primary basis of the prosecution was on the size of the lobster tails, not on the packaging.

  As McNab's own brief in the 11th Circuit noted, "the principal charge against McNab was that some of his crew kept some percentage of lobsters with a tail length shorter than 5.5 inches."

  It's true that violations also included packaging the lobsters incorrectly, but that was not the key part of the prosecution, Webb said.

  "The notion the case was about packaging is incorrect," he said. "Packaging was the means by which the crime was concealed. It was the mechanism to conceal the extent of overharvesting."

Agreed that "greenies" aren't the only ones making billions off of CO2 hysteria -- see the Koch brothers in the article below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

but there are lots of people seeking to make money in the carbon and carbon trading game, and IIRC Gore is indeed one of them. A description of the billions at play already can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

where the number given is "60 billion dollars" which certainly counts as "billions" in any marketplace where people make a margin on all trades. The bulk of the people making money of of CO2 hysteria are, however, not Greenpeace volunteers or the like -- they are the same extremely wealthy individuals and companies who both "run civilization" and incidentally own the big energy companies worldwide. If you looked at where directly invested money intended to combat CO_2 goes (e.g. research money) a substantial fraction goes directly to the energy industry in the form of research grants, another substantial fraction goes to the energy industry in the form of subsidies. But the real payoff for the big carbon-based energy companies is, paradoxically, in the artificial inflation of carbon based energy costs to the consumer. Again, power companies make marginal profits, generally at what amounts to a fixed (publicly regulated) margin. The only way for them to increase profits at fixed production is to raise prices. The only way to raise prices in a world where coal is plentiful and cheap is to create an artificial scarcity, which has the added benefit of stretching out the lifetime of profitability of the resource to the owner. I would argue -- although it is difficult to put specific numbers to this since it is difficult to see just what fraction of the cost of a kilowatt-hour is directly attributable to the global warming hysteria, and because the media is strangely reluctant to follow the money (perhaps because they are predominantly owned by the same wealthy people, perhaps because they profit from things that rouse strong feelings, like an impending global catastrophe) -- that the increased marginal profits to the global energy industry due to catastrophe-driven price increases dwarfs all other money being made in association with the hysteria and is the great invisible elephant in the debate.

As Br'er Rabbit once said, "Don't through me into that briar patch, oh please no no no..."

I am, however, curious as to why you'd ask for citations and then refer to the billions being made off of "denying" climate change by (specifically) two large oil companies. Surely you understand that oil companies are nearly irrelevant to global warming, a small fraction (around 13%) of greenhouse emissions relative to coal fired electrical plants, industrial energy production, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

and

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

The oil companies are perfectly happy to skim billions off of the artificial renewables industry that has been created by the hysteria, and until this year have been both investing and making billions from it. But the bottom has apparently fallen out of this:

http://www.eenews.net/stories/...

very likely driven by the increased supply of oil and gasoline that is reflected in oil prices dropping by nearly 1/3 this year. They are suffering far more from a SURPLUS of oil that leads to low prices and hence a serious hit on their profits than they ever suffered from global warming hysteria in a world where demand is nearly copmletely inelastic and generally growing. It also appears that the profitability of sustainables is taking a (in my op

"but until it makes financial sense enough to get places like China and India to start using this stuff"

They are:
Chinaâ(TM)s Coal Consumption Has Finally Decreased
Beijing Cut Coal Use By 7 Percent, Proving Intentions

How many times do I have to say renewables are getting cheap?
http://costofsolar.com/cost-of...
(2013 charts out of date - solar is cheaper now!)

Solar is not 4-5 times more expensive now, it is reaching parity with coal.
Solar at Grid Parity in Utah, a Coal State With No RPS

"a huge jump in technology."
Lots of them, and they're not slowing down.
http://bxhorn.com/wp-content/u...

I have given you the proof that wind is cheapest and you choose to ignore it. How can a generator that requires fuel competewith a generator that doesn't require fuel?

Like I said, your arguments are all out of date.

There is ZERO chance that solar will knock off 3/4ths of their costs in the next decade.

It's funny, because if you care to look, you'll see that from 1977 the price of solar went from $76.00 a watt to less thaqn $0.74 a watt now, that's one hundred times less.

You seem to be having difficulty facing the truth of the current situation.

Global installed wind:
http://www.eenews.net/assets/2...

Global installed solar (take your pick):
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...

Israel gets 40% of its water from desalination, and will reach 50% next year. It also recycles 80% of its wastewater, highest in the world. They do a very good job of avoiding precisely what you claim is happening.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that a solar generating unit can't just be taken off the grid like any other unit when the desired capacity is reached. What did you think those very expensive controllers that come with mains connected solar panels do?

In what context do you mean 'taken off the grid'? If you mean that the power company can refuse to purchase the power being produced, that's true, but remember that homeowners are installing power in order to make money. They aren't going to appreciate being told 'no thank you'. As for the 'very expensive controllers', most aren't that expensive, and are designed to only take themselves offline if power shifts out of parameters. The NREL link shows that HECO wants solar systems that stay online through a higher amount of variance than is standard in order to limit how much standby generation they need.

Solar power is a bit like nuclear - It's generation cost is essentially zero, but the capital cost is so high that in order to justify using it you need to use pretty much every kwh it generates.

All of that should be very obvious once you know that there is zero threat of "overload" or whatever you have been imagining.

You know, maybe you should stop assuming what you think I know/think/imagine.

If we ever do get to the point where an area can supply your mythical 120% then that is actually very good news.

First, 120% isn't 'mythical', it's the HECO standard limit. Though I wonder what you think I meant by that 120% - I meant 120% of 'MDL' or 'Minimum Daytime Load'. Below 100%, as long as everything is operating normally, power will never go past the transfer station. Above it, it starts happening. Given that HECO has customers like Ron Hayashi, I don't think it'll take long before they're at 120% of MDL in areas.-

"Ron Hayashi, 61, this week had solar panels installed on his Oahu home, despite not having HECO approval to connect to the grid. The neighborhood where he lives already has solar capacity at 100 percent of the minimum daily load."

Now Ron is doing something interesting - he's installing a battery system that should theoretically allow him to actually load follow to some extent, rather than just supply. But he probably spent an extra $10k to do that. Me? I got a quote on solar today. $4k for a 1kw system, $10.5k for a 3kw. Keep in mind I'm in Alaska. The system would not be the smartest available. No power generation without a functioning grid and all that.

it becomes financially viable to put in some gear to move the excess across to the next substation,.

Which is precisely what I've been talking about doing... Your previous arguments have seemed to imply that nothing would need to be done.

I think they burn oil there so taking units off line means you can stop feeding them expensive fuel and get them up pretty quick when you need them later.

I KNOW they burn oil there. It's the primary reason their power is so expensive.

That's the only reason why windmills are in the mainstream of electricity generation at all - you need another 1.5MW so you connect another expensive and tiny windmill but the alternative is spending hours warming up 250MW of cheap coal capacity that devours fuel at a tremendous rate so at low demand costs a hell of a lot more per MW than a few little windmills.

Citation on this? Per the NREL study and others it seems the opposite - they utilize the power from solar & wind as primary sources and keep a 'spinning reserve' of various types of generator in case the solar/wind generators go offline for whatever reason.

The people living under it won't even notice unless they are getting paid for whatever they feed back into the local power network.

On 120% being a strawman:
Hawaii solar boom so successful, it's been halted, Dec 20, 2013:

On Oahu, 10 percent of utility customers will have rooftop solar by year-end, Rosegg said. That compares with California, where it is 2 to 3 percent, he said. And demand for new connections for PV has been heavy.
The new edict for Oahu mostly focuses on grid circuits where power available from rooftop solar reaches or exceeds 100 percent of the minimum daytime load, the low point of the total power that customers on a circuit are using.
About one-fourth of circuits on Oahu are at 100 percent, Rosegg said. At the current rate of adoption, Harris said, all electrical circuits controlled by the utility could be closed to small-scale solar within six months.
Changes could include adding grounding transformers or increasing the capacity of a substation, Rosegg said.

Combine the above statements with the power company allowing 120% Daytime Minimum Load(DML) that I found earlier, how long will it be before substations are seeing that 120%? Don't forget that commercial companies can install solar panels as well. I drive by that building fairly frequently, and it's not the only one with solar panels.
Another NREL study on Hawaii's issues, detailing technical information on WHY they're concerned.

Probably a good thing. Using corn or other edible crops has been linked to rising food prices that have been painful in the third world, the US, and Europe.

Record Food Prices Linked to Biofuels
How biofuels contribute to the food crisis
Biofuel rule puts turkey farmers in fret over corn costs
EU votes on crucial cap on biofuels made from food crops

There are other ways to do it.

'Biofuel from non-food crops within 15 years'
U.S. to Pay Farmers for Non-Food Crops for Biofuels, Vilsack Says
Quest for cheap, nonfood biofuel starts with a brewery

Of course it may not be popular is some states.

There's nothing to stop the price of electricity from plummeting to near nothing, to cheaper than tap water.

This seems unlikely. According to the report, Germany has met about 20% of its energy needs using renewables. If we assume that the renewables are fully paid for and don't require any maintenance, the renewable power is free, but that would at best result in a 20% cut in costs; the other 80% of the electricity would still need to be paid for. And those assumptions are silly: renewables do need maintenance and upkeep, which means the expenses will never be zero.

Still, if the renewables work out, that's 20% of Germany's energy needs met very cheaply. If the cost of the non-renewables went up a lot, the renewables plan would be proven to have been a good investment.

However, it appears that fossil fuels are getting cheaper, not more expensive. So from a pure economic point of view, Germany's huge build-out of renewables is not looking like the best investment it could have made.

Personally, I daydream about buildings having solar roofing tiles, so that everyone can run air conditioners on hot summer days almost for free. And I daydream about giant solar plants in desert areas. I don't think solar can meet all or even most of our energy needs, but I think it has a place. So I'm hoping Germany's grand experiment will help develop the technology and help bring costs down.

Whether or not this was the best investment Germany could have made, it's the one Germany did actually make, and I hope it works out in the long run.

The 'climate' thing is a major irritant to the Republicans. http://www.eenews.net/public/climatewire/2011/02/14/2

IMHO, some Republicans are willing to totally bork NASA just to get rid of Hansen.

Moderating the parent to -1 is an example of someone, who doesn't like the message, shooting the messanger.

Come now, nerds. All this talk and no science. How about something from the Oklahoma Geological Survey? They set out to disprove an earlier quake this year was the result of fracking. Instead, they found correlation: http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/11/02/document_pm_01.pdf

Here is some commentary on the report: http://www.eenews.net/public/eenewspm/2011/11/02/1

I'm glad you posted this.. but did you read it?

With his arm twisted, Holland would still not definitively tie the microquakes to fracturing at the well. It is fiendishly difficult to attribute earthquakes, given existing scientific uncertainties about why and when quakes are triggered. What is clear is that the quakes are not common: As Holland noted, firms have drilled 100,000 fracturing wells in Oklahoma, with three minor seismic events reported.

The fracturing continued at the Picket well after the earthquakes, and the survey detected no additional seismic activity during that time, Holland said. The well was located in a geologically complex region riven by thrust rocks, he added, and a quake would likely have occurred at some point with or without the drilling -- the rocks were primed for it.

For all of those talking about hydrofracking / drilling / wastewater disposal wells in the same sentence, as if they are the same thing.. they are three completely different processes. First you drill a well. Then the drill rig leaves, and there is a well casing going to the formation. Hydrofracturing equipment moves in and swarms over the wellsite.. but this does not involve a tall drilling rig, as there is no drilling going on. High pressure water and sand are pumped downhole until the well is sufficiently fractured. Then the fracturing equipment leaves. The well makes oil, gas and water. Not always oil.. but usually. The water is useless, so it's trucked off. If there is a whole lot of water, then trucking is expensive, so they drill a wastewater disposal well which pumps the water into a different formation. Sometimes this is on a fault line, and sometimes it lubricates the fault so that earthquakes start happening.

But notice.. the wastewater disposal well is both not on the same site nor in the same formation as the hydrofractured well. If hydrofracturing has any effect at all, it must be due to fracturing on a fault line where there isn't already a lot of fluid accumulated.

Come now, nerds. All this talk and no science. How about something from the Oklahoma Geological Survey? They set out to disprove an earlier quake this year was the result of fracking. Instead, they found correlation: http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/11/02/document_pm_01.pdf

Here is some commentary on the report: http://www.eenews.net/public/eenewspm/2011/11/02/1

I'm glad you posted this.. but did you read it?

With his arm twisted, Holland would still not definitively tie the microquakes to fracturing at the well. It is fiendishly difficult to attribute earthquakes, given existing scientific uncertainties about why and when quakes are triggered. What is clear is that the quakes are not common: As Holland noted, firms have drilled 100,000 fracturing wells in Oklahoma, with three minor seismic events reported.

The fracturing continued at the Picket well after the earthquakes, and the survey detected no additional seismic activity during that time, Holland said. The well was located in a geologically complex region riven by thrust rocks, he added, and a quake would likely have occurred at some point with or without the drilling -- the rocks were primed for it.

For all of those talking about hydrofracking / drilling / wastewater disposal wells in the same sentence, as if they are the same thing.. they are three completely different processes. First you drill a well. Then the drill rig leaves, and there is a well casing going to the formation. Hydrofracturing equipment moves in and swarms over the wellsite.. but this does not involve a tall drilling rig, as there is no drilling going on. High pressure water and sand are pumped downhole until the well is sufficiently fractured. Then the fracturing equipment leaves. The well makes oil, gas and water. Not always oil.. but usually. The water is useless, so it's trucked off. If there is a whole lot of water, then trucking is expensive, so they drill a wastewater disposal well which pumps the water into a different formation. Sometimes this is on a fault line, and sometimes it lubricates the fault so that earthquakes start happening.

But notice.. the wastewater disposal well is both not on the same site nor in the same formation as the hydrofractured well. If hydrofracturing has any effect at all, it must be due to fracturing on a fault line where there isn't already a lot of fluid accumulated.

Come now, nerds. All this talk and no science. How about something from the Oklahoma Geological Survey? They set out to disprove an earlier quake this year was the result of fracking. Instead, they found correlation:
http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/11/02/document_pm_01.pdf

Here is some commentary on the report:
http://www.eenews.net/public/eenewspm/2011/11/02/1

Come now, nerds. All this talk and no science. How about something from the Oklahoma Geological Survey? They set out to disprove an earlier quake this year was the result of fracking. Instead, they found correlation:
http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/11/02/document_pm_01.pdf

Here is some commentary on the report:
http://www.eenews.net/public/eenewspm/2011/11/02/1

Yes, the grid is not designed for surges. I'm not sure why this is even news because everybody and their brother who knows anything about wind power knows that sometimes you have to shut the turbine off or throttle it back when the wind is blowing too strongly. Yes, a town I used to live in got about half of its electricity from a wind farm just outside, that's how I know: a turbine would stop spinning under three conditions, it needed maintenance, it was turning to face the wind, or the wind was blowing too strongly. Incidentally, there are other reasons not to generate power in high wind situations as well, it tends to increase wear on the props of the turbine if they spin to fast and shortens their useful lifetime. (Most modern turbines have a gearbox and transmission to keep the props spinning at a constant velocity but vary the amount of power coming out, but there's still a limit, i.e. whatever gear is highest determines the highest wind speed).

What's more important here though, is that the transmission grid is built for traditional plants, that also means the very high voltage transmission lines tend to originate at those plants, not at wind farms. Part of the problem here is that the grid was built for one type of power generation and switching the locales of where power is being generated using wind and solar don't have the high capacity lines that are necessary for large scale power generation. That's why Obama called for an overhaul of the electric grid just after he was elected. Not sure if that's started happening or not, but I hope they would have spent some of the stimulus money on it since that is precisely one of the best things economic stimulus should be used for.

I can't believe that your comment got modded insightful.

NONE of the data has been erased. Here's a quote:

The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends, Jones said.

"When you're looking at climate data, you don't want stations that are showing urban warming trends," Jones said, "so we've taken them out." Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks, he added. "We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world."

Refuting CEI's claims of data-destruction, Jones said, "We haven't destroyed anything. The data is still there -- you can still get these stations from the [NOAA] National Climatic Data Center."

In other words, the guys at CRU deleted the junk which they didn't think was worth keeping. But since their data came from external sources, all of the original data is STILL AVAILABLE. Of course, you won't hear about that at the usual denier blogs, since it's just so much easier to keep your flock bleeting in ignorance when you can say "OMFG, DEY DELETED DA DAT0RZ!!!!".

In response to the data loss claim, CRU states that only 5% of data was removed but it is still available from NOAA. http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2009/10/14/3

Shell Exploration and Production Co. has been experimenting with electricity to heat the rock up to 700 degrees at a site west of Denver. A heating element is lowered into the well to slowly convert the keragen into oils and gases, which are pumped to the surface. The company says it intends to make a decision about commercial development efforts by about 2010.

There are always new ways of doing things. BTW, this has been being tested (and written about) for the last 5 years. They are pretty much going to do it. They were waiting to see what would happen with the market and if they could do it without hurting the watertable (it involves freezing the rock around the area and then heating the core). One idea that they were exploring was using regular heat from deeper down via a heat conducting pipe. At this time, they think that it is cheaper using electrical iff they have a nuke or alternative power.

If you apply the same technology to rocks with water, then you can change it into steam and have it follow the cracks very easily. The question is, which is cheaper, obtaining relatively thin water from deep down or piping it 3000 miles AFTER desalination? it may be interesting to see what China does.

The crude that comes out of this source is actually easier to refine.

Which source? The product of oil sands is solid at room temperature, and requires both cracking and desulfurization IIRC.

In at least two of the processes natural gas is a suprluss [sic] product.

I think you have not learned the distinction between natural gas, cracker off-gas and synthesis gas. They are not interchangeable.

Water usage isn't the issue for this source, power is. Hence part of the political roadblock. Indeed, if used intelligently, this process can be used to produce surpluss *clean* water, as well as power for the electrical grid.

Production of oil from tar sands requires 2 barrels of water per barrel of oil. The situation with Fischer-Tropsch (the governor of Montana wants to use coal-to-liquids to prop up his economy) is roughly the same.

You don't get a free ride if you use in-situ retorting. Here's what The Rand Corporation has to say about it:

All high-grade western oil shale resources lie in the Colorado River drainage basin. For mining and surface retorting, the major water quality issue is the leaching of salts and toxics from spent shale. A number of approaches are available for preventing surface water contamination from waste piles, but it is not clear whether these methods represent a permanent solution that will be effective after the site is closed and abandoned. For in-situ retorting, inadequate information is available on the fate, once extraction operations cease, of salts and other minerals that are commingled with oil shale.

There's no proof that freeze-walls will work on such a large scale, that the boreholes will remain open as the shale is retorted (it expands, which would tend to occlude the bores), or several of the other things that would have to work to get the oil out. We can be pretty certain that production cannot be ramped up fast enough to compensate for declining production elsewhere. We can be pretty much assured that the groundwater in the area will be a toxic mess for millennia, though.

E85 provides a transition to ethanol driven fuel cells. Ethanol driven fuel cells are showing the best potential as far as infrastructure requirements.

Hogwash. The US burns about 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year, and another 63 billion gallons of distillate (diesel). You're not going to replace that with ethanol (especially not from corn!), and you've still got the remaining 1/3 of US demand that goes to non-transportation uses. US production of ethanol is due to get up to around 5 billion gallons/year. Uh, w00t?

The best replacement for petroleum transportation fuel isn't alternative petroleum, it's electricity. The grid is here, and its spare capacity in off-peak hours is enough to move several times as much energy as our vehicles need (total generation capacity almost 1 TW, average is ~450 GW; do the math). We've got several suitable varieties of Li-ion batteries on the market already, a carbon-backed lead-acid technology (which radically reduces weight and increases lifespan) coming, and several different supercapacitor technologies either on the market or under development (EEStor). To keep electricity from becoming the transport energy source of choice, ALL of them will have to fail. Electricity has further advantages:

• Stationary plants can sacrifice lightness and form factor for high efficiency and cleanliness.
• Stationary plants can use energy sources which cannot be packaged for a vehicle.
• Stationary plants can co-generate with fuel being used for heat.

In order for extracting oil from, say, the tar sands to be profitable the price has to climb above a threshold, be it $100 or $200+.

Actually the real cost for extraction is about ~$23 a barrel. http://www.eenews.net/specialreports/tarsands/sr_t arsands1.htm I know some people that live up in that area. The whole area has been in a boom for the last 7-10 years... Canada will soon be an oil economy. Of course they will have to drop the Kyoto treaty do to the fact that getting at this oil requires burning some of it (to heat the sand and mineing the sand). Then again, afaik none of the Kyoto signatories are even close to stopping increased C02 emissions much less getting back to 1990 levels.