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According to a 2007 Journal of Economic Literature article by Ian W. H. Parry, Margaret Walls, and Winston Harrington, table 2, covering externalities related to greenhouse warming (under the assumption the IPCC has it all right) would justify a $.06/gallon gas tax. This isn't from anti-climate folks, this article is the one cited most by pro-climate change believers and is very anti-cars, pro super-high gas-tax.

The average U.S. gas tax is already 700% higher than needed to cover that specific externality. Local pollution is higher, accidents, congestion, etc... are also much higher, but driving an EV instead of a gasoline car don't make any difference there. In reality, if you take into account negative externalities, then EVs should be taxed extra to account for them, not given subsidies.

Back in reality, the politicians (on either side) aren't asking what the right tax/subsidy levels to take care of externalities is, they're just coming up with ways to benefit their friends. The Democratic Party politicians just happen to be especially good at that, being able to use their populist environmentalism (as opposed to real conservationism) to justify transferring large amounts of wealth to their friends.

The latest EIA 2014 projections for growth. Hardly exponential, and they've been pretty close to reality in those projections.

EIA has been massively off on renewables for as long as I've been following them.

According to this paper: http://www.rff.org/rff/Documen...

renewables are one of the EIA's biggest trouble spots in predicting.

Note the paper is from a few years ago. EIA was screwing up forecasts of renewables way back then, and (IMHO) they still are.

Besides being unnecessarily insulting, you're actually comparing two different things. (For one, don't claim "a massive amount" when you reference a single study and fail to link to that study. The paper is this.)

What you said is:

increases in the weight of passengers is also putting a drag on fuel economy. As we get fatter and fatter, it obviously takes more energy to move us around.

Which is simply not true. Car mass only affects fuel efficiency of acceleration and it affects it linearly in total car + contents mass.

What's supported by the article is your second point: that people buy more SUVs as a result of being heavier. However, they fail to separate out the other factors driving SUV purchase (a fact they freely admit but you don't).

We fund so-called 'sustainable energy' projects and other such things that aren't economically viable without government funding.

You do realize that the oil industry has quite a few tax subsidies also, don't you? They've been getting them for years.

And the proposed plan is to grant public access to the data. Have you ever gone down to a government office and tried to get information on anything? A government clerk does the search. Sometimes, when they say they don't find anything, you just have to wonder how hard did they look. Especially some of those old crones that have been there for decades and short of going on a shooting spree, have absolutely no worry of being fired.

I can easily see people with money to invest investing in genetic enhancements that will stay in the family tree forever. That is a nobrainer. The real problem isn't even that educated people have fewer kids. Rich and/or educated men have always been able to father more than enough kids, assuming they weren't picky when choosing a mate. It is the educated women who are the problem. This study is about the benefits of educating the girls in poor countries, but a similar phenomenon is happening at the other end of the economic spectrum.

No matter how helpful the father is with childcare, that nine month pregancy, followed up with a year of breastfeeding can really impact on the job performance of a fulltime professional. After that, someone must watch the kids, who do much better when raised by adults, male or female, who are as smart as they are. These people do not work for minimum wage at the local childcare center. So smart, rich kids are very expensive and society can only afford so many of them. Now that smart girls are less likely to go into teaching, employers (and employees, too, but I think they already are) must work very hard at figuring out how to squeeze parenting and professional level employment into one life. The obvious solution to the pregancy problem is surrogate mothering, something that is happening more and more, especially in countries with different moral standards than the USA (where it is done for infertility, not for convenience). Or, if we want to completely change the world for women and their employers, not to mention the kids, bring on Aldous Huxley's Bottle Babies.

Even WITH reprocessing, even if you dilute the fuel with Thorium to stretch it out, you don't have enough.

There is only ~3.3 million tons [pdf] of Uranium on the planet. That's ALL Uranium, not the fissile U235 which makes up less than 1% of it. But let's assume we only use CANDU type reactors which do not need enrichment.

A 1000 MW nuclear plant goes through about 25 tons of fuel per year. As of the year 2000, we need 11.7 trillion watts [pdf] of continuous power to satisfy demand. (350 quadrillion BTUs per year converts to 11.7 trillion joules per second)

So if you were to build 1000MW powerplants, you would need 11,700 of them. Each using 25 tons of fuel a year for a total of 292,500 tons a year. Without reprocessing and thorium additives and other hybrid fuels, you've only got about 12 years worth of Uranium if we are to produce 100% of our energy needs with Nuclear.

Reprocessing can recover 96% of the uranium from spent fuel, so let's say that we can effectively double the usable fuel through reprocessing... now we have 24 years worth of fuel. This would then include the produced fissile Plutonium being reprocessed into the fuel (MOX fuels).

Now, Thorium? There's an estimated 1.4 million tons [pdf] of Thorium. If all of that can be used (thorium creates fissile U233 when used inside reactors, that's why it's useful) then we just add that to the 3.3 million tons we already have.. in other words, about 43% more fuel. We're up to about 34 years!

And this is assuming year 2000 levels of energy usage...

Am I missing anything? If you think any of the above is wrong then please let's discuss it...
=Smidge=

Even WITH reprocessing, even if you dilute the fuel with Thorium to stretch it out, you don't have enough.

There is only ~3.3 million tons [pdf] of Uranium on the planet. That's ALL Uranium, not the fissile U235 which makes up less than 1% of it. But let's assume we only use CANDU type reactors which do not need enrichment.

A 1000 MW nuclear plant goes through about 25 tons of fuel per year. As of the year 2000, we need 11.7 trillion watts [pdf] of continuous power to satisfy demand. (350 quadrillion BTUs per year converts to 11.7 trillion joules per second)

So if you were to build 1000MW powerplants, you would need 11,700 of them. Each using 25 tons of fuel a year for a total of 292,500 tons a year. Without reprocessing and thorium additives and other hybrid fuels, you've only got about 12 years worth of Uranium if we are to produce 100% of our energy needs with Nuclear.

Reprocessing can recover 96% of the uranium from spent fuel, so let's say that we can effectively double the usable fuel through reprocessing... now we have 24 years worth of fuel. This would then include the produced fissile Plutonium being reprocessed into the fuel (MOX fuels).

Now, Thorium? There's an estimated 1.4 million tons [pdf] of Thorium. If all of that can be used (thorium creates fissile U233 when used inside reactors, that's why it's useful) then we just add that to the 3.3 million tons we already have.. in other words, about 43% more fuel. We're up to about 34 years!

And this is assuming year 2000 levels of energy usage...

Am I missing anything? If you think any of the above is wrong then please let's discuss it...
=Smidge=

While this proposal is a natural winner here at /., it's sad that only a combination of terror hype and hi-tech government contracts have attracted a defense of an essential natural resource. Decades of obvious noxious pollution have scored only infrequently adequate committments to guard against the polluters, almost invariably domestic corporations. Even the landmark Superfund has been abandoned by BushCo.

While we're on a roll, how about expanding the robot corps, patrolling all public territory for polluters, under the direction of a team of government rangers? Roll the healthcare and liability/damages savings into constructive public safety jobs for Americans without guns, at the cutting edge of communications and automation.

Nobody is going to refute the idea that we'll eventually hit another ice age. The planet's mean temperature has been fluctuating since it first formed. That happens on much longer scales than are being discussed with global climate change. The transition to an ice age (cooling seems to happen more slowly than warming, based on archaeological evidence) happens over an extended period of time; human-induced climate change will occur much more quickly. And because it can happen faster than species can adapt, it's a problem even just to accelerate an otherwise natural cycle.

If you look at any credible source, including studies commissioned by the current US administration which would love to find that global climate change isn't happening, you find that there's near unanimity. Anyone who is trying to tell you global climate change isn't either happening or going to happen given the current situation is just flat out wrong. Rather than just looking at studies by generic *ologists, I'd suggest looking at sources by people who specialize in the environment. People who had rejected the idea of global warming until fairly recently have accepted that it's happening and are instead trying to say we don't need to worry about mitigation right now (see overview of study here [rff.org]). Of course, Mendelsohn's model, by his own admission, doesn't taken into account any externalities which is a serious weakness of it (that and when he gave a talk on campus a couple weeks ago, he ended up using circular logic to answer one of my questions about his results.. oops.)