What about when Bjorn Lomborg quoted each piece of the entire Scientific American article that criticized him and gave lengthy commentary on each portion, but still resulted in copying the entire article?
It will seem fresh and creative to a young voter who may have been 3 years old when the original '1984' ad came out.
Um... as a matter of fact, I was born in 1981, dude... and I've made several posts saying how it's not fresh and creative. The Mac ad was cool when I first saw it, and has since become cliche. All they did was swap out Hillary for the guy on the screen. Big deal.
So, anyone going to explain why editing the "Palpatine zaps Luke Skywalker" so that the Emporer has Hillary's face, won't be considered original?
Okay, you're starting to compromise your "friend" status, but let me try here:
I have no control over whether people like my video. I do have control over whether it has the characteristic that made the Hillary one popular, that I can't seem to understand.
The video I described most likely won't get popular. What I want to know is, how does it not have the characteristic that made the existing 1984 parody popular? What is that characteristic? The problem is, people can't really explain it. They're drawn to it without even knowing why.
On the other hand, if a well-done video of Hillary electrocuting Luke with her fingertips did get popular and widely viewed, you'd have to wonder exactly how much imagination went into the original. Cause it sure wasn't hard to think of mine.
Take a random clip of some villan from a movie -- say, Palpatine electrocuting Luke? Then, digitally edit it Hillary's face into it so it looks like she's doing it. "Hahah! Hillary's electrocuting someone! We shouldn't vote for someone who'd electrocute people with her fingertips!"
Now, explain to me in what sense the 1984 Hillary ad revealed imagination and originality, but the one I just described, didn't.
Okay, that actually starts to bring sense to it.:-) Still, it doesn't seem very effective. I mean, who really thinks Obama isn't doing exactly the same thing to an audience just as brainwashed?
Hold on: are you talking about health insurance, or health insulation? Insurance means "paying a relatively small amount to hedge against catastrophes". "Insulation" means "getting someone else to nominally cover your costs while really just hiding them".
Since you're talking about the immense risk contractors supposedly have of being bankrupted by illness, you must be talking about the former. However, if that's all you want to buy, it's actually very cheap. If the policy is high-deductible and only for major expenses, *and the state you live in allows these kinds of policies*, it's very cheap. $100/month, tops. Contractors can afford that. Every contractor where I work can afford health insurance qua insurance, very easily in fact.
The problem is that in many states, *in order* to buy the catastrophic coverage, which *is* a necessity, you have to buy all kinds of other mandated benefits, including doctor visits (which is like a car insurer paying for oil changes).
So the problem is only that people are legally prohibited from buying affordable insurance. And even if that weren't the problem, why is it a good idea to concentrate all the costs on the people who are stupid enough to hire workers?
Coming up with the idea in the first place required imagination.
*Which* idea? The idea to mold a previous successful ad into something else? The idea to swap out a villan from some artwork, with someone you hate? (Cause no one's ever done that, right?)
The original Apple ad carried no additional information either, but made a very effective point. Anyone familiar with the concept of Big Brother can see the point. Therefore it's effective in its simplicity. If instead it just displayed negative information about Hillary it would be very boring and not get people talking about the actual point.
Well, I originally thought it was trying to play off the fears of "Hillary as Big Brother", but a) I thought that idea wasn't popular among Democrats, even pro-Obama ones, and b) why not, um, actually use scary quotes from Hillary? There's a lot of stuff out there, "We need to stop thinking about what is good for the individual", etc. Instead they just put a video of her rambling about some vague generalities typical of politicians. I just didn't see what was so special.
Well, he used a fairly iconic commercial as a platform for parody to make a political point.
That doesn't require imagination.
Not only that...the job he did appeared fairly good to my eyes...quality-wise.
That requires technical skill, not imagination.
I'd say he did a good job...made an effective point, and with little investment but personal time editing the video, he reached a worldwide audience both on the internet and television.
Maybe I'm clueless, but I just don't see what the "effective point" of that ad was. It looks like just a cheap attempt to say, "Hillary bad". And indeed she is. But you could replace the video of her in the ad with Bush, or Cheney, or Obama, or the challenger in the dog-catcher primary for Hicksville County, Alabama. What actual negative information does it convey about Hillary Clinton other than "She, like the rest of the human race, kinda looks scary (but actually mostly boring) when edited into that cool Mac ad." ?
That's because you probably work in a blue or Rust Belt state, where every economic exchange turns into a last ditch battle of the capitalists vs. the proletarians.
Elsewhere, as the other posters have pointed out, that's not the case.
I'm always confused as to why people get outraged over this. Remember, they're not worth hiring if they have to provide some additional mandated benefit. Yet most workers would prefer the extra hours, even if the benefits wouldn't attach. So instead, they end up taking two part times jobs, neither of which pays benefits, even though either employer would have been willing to provide the same hours as both together.
So, explain to me how that's better than working at one place for the "full time" hours but no benefits?
No offense, and not to rock the boat or anything, but who cares? My uncle works as an independent contractor. He gets hired to do jobs, and after the job is done, he's "guaranteed unemployment". He doesn't get vestiture in every organization he ever does work for. So what? What's so sacred about that?
1) a) Reducing your energy usage is equivalent to reducing the bid (on global markets) for a marginal unit of energy. As long as someone else has a profitable use for the energy at that price (which is inevitable given the global volume of energy used), they will buy what you didn't. b) Of course you know what the Laffer Curve is -- that's what you were clumsily mocking. 2) So what? You mocked the idea that halving taxes could double "your" income. I showed how it's trivially possible. a) As long as you agree with the concept of the Laffer Curve (diminishing marginal returns to taxation), you concede the point, and are shifting to the murkier debate over where precisely we are on the curve. b) No one claims you are "supposed" to do anything. No one claims *anyone* is supposed to do anything. The argument is that taxation affects the ROR on productive activities relative to other uses of their time and for *some* class of people it will move them to increase productivity, which is inevitable, since it shifts the margin of productive activity. 3) No, it was a mixing of various distinct concepts. 4) So don't mock the concept when you agree with it. 5) Typos are fine. Typos that reveal ignorance of the concept at the same time you are trying to show off your knowledge of potentially relevant topics, are not. 6) Yes it is, see 1) and 7). 7) "Light usage" is not the relevant good; energy usage is. So they get the same light while reducing energy usage. In optimal assumptions (i.e. that the light quality really truly is the same) that shows up as an increase in disposalbe income. If they are ignorant of the cause of that savings, and their incentives are the same, their use of that money necessarily uses energy. Whether they apply it to shoes, driving around more, loaning to people who then use it to buy an energy-using product, etc., they are applying the savings toward energy consumption. Even if they do bury it in the back yard, that still frees up energy on global markets for someone else to buy and use.
Your needless condescension is duly noted.
Sorry, but it was quite a bit of work to untangle the mess you created.
Note: I don't necessarily have a problem with profitability and am perfectly happy with a capitalistic approach to academic journals....
I feel the same way. Sometimes, it's a good idea to hire the services of a for-profit group, and sometimes it's not. Contributors to SAE journals need to ask of the publisher, "Why should we still use you? What value are you providing?" Likely, the publisher used to do something useful, back when it was hard to aggregate the relevant information in one place, but now the internet has made them obsolete. I could understand if authors want to make money from the work, but that's not the case here.
It's not an issue of the rightness of profit; it's an issue of whether this for-profit publisher is still useful.
1) Fungibility of energy on global markets is a completely different matter from the Laffer Curve. 2) If you are taxed 2/3 of your income, halving your taxes will indeed double your net income. 3) "My" income is not the same is government revenue. 4) No one claims that taxes don't affect government revenue, just that there is some threshold above which higher taxes will not increase revenue, which is indisputably true (what does a 100% tax bring?). 5) It's the "Jevons paradox", not "Jevon's paradox". 6) Jevons effects *do* impact the merit of various solutions, even if they're not deal-breakers for you. 7) If it's uncertain that a switch to CFLs will increase energy usage, it's just as uncertain that it will decrease. "May, depends on", indeed.
I'm not sure I can justify holding your hand for much more.
Nuclear power is less polluting, if the storage and safety issues can be worked out. You'll find the people who really oppose nuclear power are suburban NIMBYists who just don't want a nuke plant in THEIR backyard.
No, there are real environmentalists who oppose nuclear power.
Solar panels are not now worse for the environment, nor have they been for a long time. Where are you getting that idea?
I thought that because of the very resource-intense manufacturing processes, combined with the short life, made them worse in some cases, though I'd be interested to see an objective breakdown.
Your CFL argument makes no sense, maybe you could explain it better? Because it sounds like you are saying that no one should ever try to reduce energy usage, as it will always be futile. Is that what you are saying?
Yes, if *everything* stays the same except that one person uses less energy, that's an improvement. The problem is that that doesn't happen. If you banned incandescents and saved people money, they're not going to bury the money; they'll spend it in ways that use energy somewhere else. Even if you personally decide not to use as much, someone else will, thanks to the highly advanced global energy markets, notice the decrease in price and buy up the energy for whatever ends he wants to pursue.
This doesn't mean all attempts to reduce environmental impact are futile; it means that trying to individually ban or replace the uncountably infinite instances of "excessive" uses, is. Only by punishing the actual bad you're trying to reduce (net emissions), and then applying the funds to mitigating the harms, will work as a sustainable solution.
Along the same lines, when people say they want to ban specific wasteful things, you have to ask, what does that mean? Why is a "wasteful thing" bad? What is "waste"? What they usually mean by waste is "low value per unit resource consumed". In other words, "Gosh, why do you gotta use 2X to produce Y, when you could just be using X to produce that same way?". Presumably of course, his "Y" is fixed and will be done, regardless.
The problem of course, is that only the individual himself can decide how highly he values some "Y" (like incandescent light, or driving a Hummer). Telling someone he doesn't "really" enjoy it is just avoiding the central issue. When you say that "waste" as such, is bad, you're saying that that individual doesn't get enough "value per unit resource consumed".
The absurdity then, is that decrying waste is, at root, saying, "Oh, it doesn't matter how much CO2 you admit, but you had better damn well reach a minimum threshold of happiness per ton emitted! "
That's why I say it's better to simply assess people the costs of their activities and then let them decide for themselves if it's still "worth it".
Not that I disagree with living close to work and all, but have you every noticed how every time an environmentalist idea is debunked, someone points out that real environmentalists don't support that?
"If env's want to cut down on CO2 emissions, why don't they support nuclear?" "Oh well, real env's are all about nuclear."
"Solar panels are often worse for the environment once you consider manufacturing and design life." "Oh well, real env's can see through all the solar propaganda."
"Priuses are actually worse than Hummers." "Well, real env's don't use Priuses."
"If people save money using CFL's, won't they just apply the savings to some other energy use? Or won't someone else on global energy markets do the same?" "Well, real env's have ALWAYS seen the futility of trying to micromanage into energy use reductions, and instead want a simple tax on emissions with the funds going to cleanup and pollution sinks."
Who is the authority on what an "environmentalist" ought to believe?
I find it interesting that, unlike how your parents might have raised you, in the legal world, "he started it!" and "everybody does it!" mix together to form the valid legal defense called estoppel.
Sorry, that calculation was for 10% over 5 years. It actually increased 20%. (10/50) Still, they've been steady at $50 for about ten years, so the surprise is why it didn't increase sooner.
What Harik said. Polluting piecewise everywhere there's a car is NOT the same thing as polluting in one centralized place. Diminishing returns, people! The more concentrated the pollution is, the cheaper it is to clean up per mass unit of pollutant. If we could have a locally-clean energy-releasing mechanism, we could have all of the city's/province's/nation's/world's pollution in one place -- preferably, like, far away from most people:-P -- and it would have the lowest possible cleanup costs, PLUS it would impact the smallest number of people. That is the benefit of an air (or electric) car, which persists even if fossil fuels are used in the same amounts. (Though as another poster mentioned, it also gives you the freedom to use *whatever* energy source is the most convenient, as long as it can compress air.)
Of course, if you tell certain environmentalists that the technology is great "because we can just move all the pollution to one place where it's easy to clean up", suddenly they find a reason to be against it. Go fig.
Like sjames above said, that would already fall under the "non-obvious" requirement. The million dollar question is, "what is a clear, transparent, well-defined method to test for obviousness?"
One idea that gets thrown around a lot is to take 1 (or 2 or 3 or n) people who work in that field, tell them the *goal* the patent attempts to achieve (without telling them the patent), and ask them to list all ways they'd consider approaching it. If one of them picks the method described in the application, it count as obvious. Otherwise, no.
The problems I can think of with that are
1) Defining "work in that field". One idea from one field may be applied by analogy to another one. Which group do you go to? What about emerging fields?
2) Cost: who should bear the cost of this? Thinkers don't work for free, or if they were expected to do it as a courtesy, only EXTREMELY obvious patents would be found. Perhaps, "to apply for a patent, you must have reviewed n patents before"?
3) Does this yield a "false negative" if no one suggests a particular solution, even though they thought of it, "because that's a stupid way to approach the problem"? I say no, because if it's obvious "but stupid" until someone gets it to work, it's not obvious, but I can also see some gray areas.
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What about when Bjorn Lomborg quoted each piece of the entire Scientific American article that criticized him and gave lengthy commentary on each portion, but still resulted in copying the entire article?
It will seem fresh and creative to a young voter who may have been 3 years old when the original '1984' ad came out.
... as a matter of fact, I was born in 1981, dude ... and I've made several posts saying how it's not fresh and creative. The Mac ad was cool when I first saw it, and has since become cliche. All they did was swap out Hillary for the guy on the screen. Big deal.
Um
So, anyone going to explain why editing the "Palpatine zaps Luke Skywalker" so that the Emporer has Hillary's face, won't be considered original?
Okay, you're starting to compromise your "friend" status, but let me try here:
I have no control over whether people like my video. I do have control over whether it has the characteristic that made the Hillary one popular, that I can't seem to understand.
The video I described most likely won't get popular. What I want to know is, how does it not have the characteristic that made the existing 1984 parody popular? What is that characteristic? The problem is, people can't really explain it. They're drawn to it without even knowing why.
On the other hand, if a well-done video of Hillary electrocuting Luke with her fingertips did get popular and widely viewed, you'd have to wonder exactly how much imagination went into the original. Cause it sure wasn't hard to think of mine.
Er, yeah, that's the point. Let's say I did this:
Take a random clip of some villan from a movie -- say, Palpatine electrocuting Luke? Then, digitally edit it Hillary's face into it so it looks like she's doing it. "Hahah! Hillary's electrocuting someone! We shouldn't vote for someone who'd electrocute people with her fingertips!"
Now, explain to me in what sense the 1984 Hillary ad revealed imagination and originality, but the one I just described, didn't.
Okay, that actually starts to bring sense to it. :-) Still, it doesn't seem very effective. I mean, who really thinks Obama isn't doing exactly the same thing to an audience just as brainwashed?
Hold on: are you talking about health insurance, or health insulation? Insurance means "paying a relatively small amount to hedge against catastrophes". "Insulation" means "getting someone else to nominally cover your costs while really just hiding them".
Since you're talking about the immense risk contractors supposedly have of being bankrupted by illness, you must be talking about the former. However, if that's all you want to buy, it's actually very cheap. If the policy is high-deductible and only for major expenses, *and the state you live in allows these kinds of policies*, it's very cheap. $100/month, tops. Contractors can afford that. Every contractor where I work can afford health insurance qua insurance, very easily in fact.
The problem is that in many states, *in order* to buy the catastrophic coverage, which *is* a necessity, you have to buy all kinds of other mandated benefits, including doctor visits (which is like a car insurer paying for oil changes).
So the problem is only that people are legally prohibited from buying affordable insurance. And even if that weren't the problem, why is it a good idea to concentrate all the costs on the people who are stupid enough to hire workers?
Coming up with the idea in the first place required imagination.
*Which* idea? The idea to mold a previous successful ad into something else? The idea to swap out a villan from some artwork, with someone you hate? (Cause no one's ever done that, right?)
The original Apple ad carried no additional information either, but made a very effective point. Anyone familiar with the concept of Big Brother can see the point. Therefore it's effective in its simplicity. If instead it just displayed negative information about Hillary it would be very boring and not get people talking about the actual point.
Well, I originally thought it was trying to play off the fears of "Hillary as Big Brother", but a) I thought that idea wasn't popular among Democrats, even pro-Obama ones, and b) why not, um, actually use scary quotes from Hillary? There's a lot of stuff out there, "We need to stop thinking about what is good for the individual", etc. Instead they just put a video of her rambling about some vague generalities typical of politicians. I just didn't see what was so special.
Let me guess -- you didn't see any evidence Dan Rather was fired either, right?
Well, he used a fairly iconic commercial as a platform for parody to make a political point.
That doesn't require imagination.
Not only that...the job he did appeared fairly good to my eyes...quality-wise.
That requires technical skill, not imagination.
I'd say he did a good job...made an effective point, and with little investment but personal time editing the video, he reached a worldwide audience both on the internet and television.
Maybe I'm clueless, but I just don't see what the "effective point" of that ad was. It looks like just a cheap attempt to say, "Hillary bad". And indeed she is. But you could replace the video of her in the ad with Bush, or Cheney, or Obama, or the challenger in the dog-catcher primary for Hicksville County, Alabama. What actual negative information does it convey about Hillary Clinton other than "She, like the rest of the human race, kinda looks scary (but actually mostly boring) when edited into that cool Mac ad." ?
Seriously.
That's because you probably work in a blue or Rust Belt state, where every economic exchange turns into a last ditch battle of the capitalists vs. the proletarians.
Elsewhere, as the other posters have pointed out, that's not the case.
I'm always confused as to why people get outraged over this. Remember, they're not worth hiring if they have to provide some additional mandated benefit. Yet most workers would prefer the extra hours, even if the benefits wouldn't attach. So instead, they end up taking two part times jobs, neither of which pays benefits, even though either employer would have been willing to provide the same hours as both together.
So, explain to me how that's better than working at one place for the "full time" hours but no benefits?
No offense, and not to rock the boat or anything, but who cares? My uncle works as an independent contractor. He gets hired to do jobs, and after the job is done, he's "guaranteed unemployment". He doesn't get vestiture in every organization he ever does work for. So what? What's so sacred about that?
And we know you're not a domainsquatter ... how?
... right.
Yeah, you just *happened* to stumble upon this name
1) a) Reducing your energy usage is equivalent to reducing the bid (on global markets) for a marginal unit of energy. As long as someone else has a profitable use for the energy at that price (which is inevitable given the global volume of energy used), they will buy what you didn't.
b) Of course you know what the Laffer Curve is -- that's what you were clumsily mocking.
2) So what? You mocked the idea that halving taxes could double "your" income. I showed how it's trivially possible.
a) As long as you agree with the concept of the Laffer Curve (diminishing marginal returns to taxation), you concede the point, and are shifting to the murkier debate over where precisely we are on the curve.
b) No one claims you are "supposed" to do anything. No one claims *anyone* is supposed to do anything. The argument is that taxation affects the ROR on productive activities relative to other uses of their time and for *some* class of people it will move them to increase productivity, which is inevitable, since it shifts the margin of productive activity.
3) No, it was a mixing of various distinct concepts.
4) So don't mock the concept when you agree with it.
5) Typos are fine. Typos that reveal ignorance of the concept at the same time you are trying to show off your knowledge of potentially relevant topics, are not.
6) Yes it is, see 1) and 7).
7) "Light usage" is not the relevant good; energy usage is. So they get the same light while reducing energy usage. In optimal assumptions (i.e. that the light quality really truly is the same) that shows up as an increase in disposalbe income. If they are ignorant of the cause of that savings, and their incentives are the same, their use of that money necessarily uses energy. Whether they apply it to shoes, driving around more, loaning to people who then use it to buy an energy-using product, etc., they are applying the savings toward energy consumption. Even if they do bury it in the back yard, that still frees up energy on global markets for someone else to buy and use.
Your needless condescension is duly noted.
Sorry, but it was quite a bit of work to untangle the mess you created.
Note: I don't necessarily have a problem with profitability and am perfectly happy with a capitalistic approach to academic journals. ...
I feel the same way. Sometimes, it's a good idea to hire the services of a for-profit group, and sometimes it's not. Contributors to SAE journals need to ask of the publisher, "Why should we still use you? What value are you providing?" Likely, the publisher used to do something useful, back when it was hard to aggregate the relevant information in one place, but now the internet has made them obsolete. I could understand if authors want to make money from the work, but that's not the case here.
It's not an issue of the rightness of profit; it's an issue of whether this for-profit publisher is still useful.
Okay... where to begin:
1) Fungibility of energy on global markets is a completely different matter from the Laffer Curve.
2) If you are taxed 2/3 of your income, halving your taxes will indeed double your net income.
3) "My" income is not the same is government revenue.
4) No one claims that taxes don't affect government revenue, just that there is some threshold above which higher taxes will not increase revenue, which is indisputably true (what does a 100% tax bring?).
5) It's the "Jevons paradox", not "Jevon's paradox".
6) Jevons effects *do* impact the merit of various solutions, even if they're not deal-breakers for you.
7) If it's uncertain that a switch to CFLs will increase energy usage, it's just as uncertain that it will decrease. "May, depends on", indeed.
I'm not sure I can justify holding your hand for much more.
Nuclear power is less polluting, if the storage and safety issues can be worked out. You'll find the people who really oppose nuclear power are suburban NIMBYists who just don't want a nuke plant in THEIR backyard.
No, there are real environmentalists who oppose nuclear power.
Solar panels are not now worse for the environment, nor have they been for a long time. Where are you getting that idea?
I thought that because of the very resource-intense manufacturing processes, combined with the short life, made them worse in some cases, though I'd be interested to see an objective breakdown.
Your CFL argument makes no sense, maybe you could explain it better? Because it sounds like you are saying that no one should ever try to reduce energy usage, as it will always be futile. Is that what you are saying?
First, a reminder back to this discussion.
To summarize a different way:
Yes, if *everything* stays the same except that one person uses less energy, that's an improvement. The problem is that that doesn't happen. If you banned incandescents and saved people money, they're not going to bury the money; they'll spend it in ways that use energy somewhere else. Even if you personally decide not to use as much, someone else will, thanks to the highly advanced global energy markets, notice the decrease in price and buy up the energy for whatever ends he wants to pursue.
This doesn't mean all attempts to reduce environmental impact are futile; it means that trying to individually ban or replace the uncountably infinite instances of "excessive" uses, is. Only by punishing the actual bad you're trying to reduce (net emissions), and then applying the funds to mitigating the harms, will work as a sustainable solution.
Along the same lines, when people say they want to ban specific wasteful things, you have to ask, what does that mean? Why is a "wasteful thing" bad? What is "waste"? What they usually mean by waste is "low value per unit resource consumed". In other words, "Gosh, why do you gotta use 2X to produce Y, when you could just be using X to produce that same way?". Presumably of course, his "Y" is fixed and will be done, regardless.
The problem of course, is that only the individual himself can decide how highly he values some "Y" (like incandescent light, or driving a Hummer). Telling someone he doesn't "really" enjoy it is just avoiding the central issue. When you say that "waste" as such, is bad, you're saying that that individual doesn't get enough "value per unit resource consumed".
The absurdity then, is that decrying waste is, at root, saying, "Oh, it doesn't matter how much CO2 you admit, but you had better damn well reach a minimum threshold of happiness per ton emitted! "
That's why I say it's better to simply assess people the costs of their activities and then let them decide for themselves if it's still "worth it".
Not that I disagree with living close to work and all, but have you every noticed how every time an environmentalist idea is debunked, someone points out that real environmentalists don't support that?
"If env's want to cut down on CO2 emissions, why don't they support nuclear?"
"Oh well, real env's are all about nuclear."
"Solar panels are often worse for the environment once you consider manufacturing and design life."
"Oh well, real env's can see through all the solar propaganda."
"Priuses are actually worse than Hummers."
"Well, real env's don't use Priuses."
"If people save money using CFL's, won't they just apply the savings to some other energy use? Or won't someone else on global energy markets do the same?"
"Well, real env's have ALWAYS seen the futility of trying to micromanage into energy use reductions, and instead want a simple tax on emissions with the funds going to cleanup and pollution sinks."
Who is the authority on what an "environmentalist" ought to believe?
Hummers may be more energy efficient, but how are they supposed to make you feel morally superior to others?
Think about it.
I find it interesting that, unlike how your parents might have raised you, in the legal world, "he started it!" and "everybody does it!" mix together to form the valid legal defense called estoppel.
Sorry, that calculation was for 10% over 5 years. It actually increased 20%. (10/50) Still, they've been steady at $50 for about ten years, so the surprise is why it didn't increase sooner.
Easier explanation:
-Why did next-gen titles five years ago cost $50?
-Now, take that answer and apply inflation for five years.
1.1^(1/5) = 1.9% per year inflation is all it takes, and it's been worse.
What Harik said. Polluting piecewise everywhere there's a car is NOT the same thing as polluting in one centralized place. Diminishing returns, people! The more concentrated the pollution is, the cheaper it is to clean up per mass unit of pollutant. If we could have a locally-clean energy-releasing mechanism, we could have all of the city's/province's/nation's/world's pollution in one place -- preferably, like, far away from most people :-P -- and it would have the lowest possible cleanup costs, PLUS it would impact the smallest number of people. That is the benefit of an air (or electric) car, which persists even if fossil fuels are used in the same amounts. (Though as another poster mentioned, it also gives you the freedom to use *whatever* energy source is the most convenient, as long as it can compress air.)
Of course, if you tell certain environmentalists that the technology is great "because we can just move all the pollution to one place where it's easy to clean up", suddenly they find a reason to be against it. Go fig.
Like sjames above said, that would already fall under the "non-obvious" requirement. The million dollar question is, "what is a clear, transparent, well-defined method to test for obviousness?"
One idea that gets thrown around a lot is to take 1 (or 2 or 3 or n) people who work in that field, tell them the *goal* the patent attempts to achieve (without telling them the patent), and ask them to list all ways they'd consider approaching it. If one of them picks the method described in the application, it count as obvious. Otherwise, no.
The problems I can think of with that are
1) Defining "work in that field". One idea from one field may be applied by analogy to another one. Which group do you go to? What about emerging fields?
2) Cost: who should bear the cost of this? Thinkers don't work for free, or if they were expected to do it as a courtesy, only EXTREMELY obvious patents would be found. Perhaps, "to apply for a patent, you must have reviewed n patents before"?
3) Does this yield a "false negative" if no one suggests a particular solution, even though they thought of it, "because that's a stupid way to approach the problem"? I say no, because if it's obvious "but stupid" until someone gets it to work, it's not obvious, but I can also see some gray areas.