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Suppose you tell the current politicians:

"Hey, I got this great invention, it will improve our transportation 10x, but it will require highly toxic and flammable chemicals to be stored in underground tanks every other block in highly populated areas. It will also cause around 1.3 million deaths per year worldwide, and become the #9 leading cause of death".

How many current politicians would approve this?

That is right, if it was for the current politicians, the car would not exist. We would all be still riding horses, which are even worse for the environment and have a fatality rate of 1 per 10,000 riders.

So I don't hold my breath for current politicians to approve self driving cars, even if 1 person gets killed by a self driving car, politicians will scream "think of the children!" and ban this right away, it will not matter if the fatality rate is even lower than manually driven cars.

It's highly unlikely that the world can safely produce almost five times as much electricity by 2035 as it does now—which is what it would take to provide everyone with a circa-2010 American standard of living

In 1890 a similar egg-head "predicted", Manhattan will be feet-deep in horse manure by 1930. A similar prediction was made for London of 1950 — the number of horses required to bring in supplies necessary for the growing population and its growing demands was calculated, along with the amount of excrement the beasts produced. The volume was then divided by the area of the city's streets to produce the depth of "coverage". An easy mathematical problem, a high-schooler solve it, so it had to be correct — and any attempts to argue against the conclusions were, of course, "anti-science".

Of course, as we know now, the automobile arrived to save the environment. But the fear-mongering did not cease...

Why exactly is humanity "highly unlikely" to be producing as much electricity as it wants to by 2035? Even today's technologies allow for that, and in 20 years we are bound to see improvements in both electricity production (higher) and consumption (lower).

I for one refuse to feel guilty about my recreation.

Yet now when it IS shown to be elsewhere,

So now shown means guessed? Or does it mean fudged or claimed? I am having trouble keeping up with the evolution of the English language.

bonus links: more proof of the consensus, dig it

If we didn't have cars, we would be knee deep in horse crap.

Being serious for a moment... no, we wouldn't. And that would be a good thing in spite of its effect on public health, insect control, and having to constantly clean it all up. There would only be localized agriculture, much lower crop yields, no processed and junk food, drastically lower human population, less opportunities for concentration of wealth... you get the picture I expect.

You realize there were cities before there were cars, right? And in those cities, there was a LARGE manure problem? According to this page it was 3,000,000 pounds PER DAY in New York City. FTA:

"even when it had been removed from the streets the manure piled up faster than it could be disposed ofearly in the century farmers were happy to pay good money for the manure, by the end of the 1800s stable owners had to pay to have it carted off. As a result of this glutvacant lots in cities across America became piled high with manure; in New York these sometimes rose to forty and even sixty feet"

Yeah, sounds like a real utopia!

Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.

[citation needed]

You are either an idiot or a troll. Burning gasoline produces large quantities of very fine soot which are a major carcinogen. Also, unburned gasoline comes out of the tailpipe of every gasoline car at startup, and that is much worse than anything which can come out of a horse.

Here is one citation

Here is another

Perhaps you prefer the new york times

Other sources are easy to find

Like it or not, the car was the solution for one of the worst pollution problems in cities.

(1) Billboard messages need to be terse and use familiar phrasing or they don't work at all

(2) The ad designer was trying to spark a little controversy and saw it as a fight-fire-with-fire, no-publicity-is-bad-publicity sort of situation.

I agree with you that something like "I still believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" would have been closer to the intended meaning, but few would be able to parse and understand that (or similar attempts to convey more subtlety) while driving 60 mph. :-)

It's also worth noting that Heritage was told to knock it off by its own featured speakers, including the previously-mentioned Ross McKitrick. Ross threatened not to come to the conference and posted his letter to Climateaudit, where many skeptics read it. Meanwhile, Donna Laframboise (creator of NOconsensus.org) actually did withdraw from the conference, also posting the reasoning to her blog. You might want to read both those links before assuming that skeptics in general are fully behind the campaign.

"Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "

Yes indeed. And anyone who claims otherwise--such as the parent--is either ignorant or dishonest. Here are some sources, but it feels unfair to only list these few.

The Hockey Stick Illusion (book about the "hockey stick")
The Delinquent Teenager (book about IPCC being infiltrated by extreme advocates)
"Understanding Climategate's hidden decline" (article about "hide the decline")
Watts Up With That? (leading blog)
Letter to the Science and Technology Committee (on fraud)

Etc. Etc.

"Except for the climatologists, to whom it's about empirical data and the scientific method."
Riiiiight...
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/09/27/here-an-activist-there-an-activist/

"If you want to win this fight, you'll need to leave the sports bar..." ... and you need to step out of the Opium den.

Karma be damned.

NASA’s Hansen asked to account for outside activities

$250,000 7th Annual Heinz Award
$50,000 29th Annual Common Wealth Awards
$1,000,000 (split three ways) Dan David Prize
$100,000 Sophie Prize
$25,000 Nierenberg Prize
$5,000 AAAS Award

etc. etc.

By April, 2011 his (publicly known) prize money amounts to $683,000

That is prize money, a.k.a income, not research grant money.

As far as the perjury goes, the "taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change" bit has no legal significance. A prosecutor would have to prove that some actively was advocacy and that Soon knew about it and understood it to be advocacy. Good luck with that.