Now, if the Orange - Raccoon gets elected and has the Nuclear codes, all of this will be a moot point. LOL We will all be taking dirt-naps.

No, it was you clearly missing my previous point.

As for an alternative to oil, there's not one. At least not in the immediate future. Alternative energies are finally making some headway, but it's taken until just recently for supporting technologies to reach a level to even make it possible to develop alternatives to oil. Your acting like everyone just needs to go buy an electric car tomorrow shows you ignorance. An electric car is very inefficient rural and mountainous areas. And they haven't even tried replacing heavy trucks with anything but diesel.

Also, petroleum is used in manufacturing almost all products. plastic is a petroleum product. Even our asphalt roads are petroleum based.

Yeah, screw oil!

Lead isn't a fuel and it wasn't the main ingredient in paint- it wasn't until they found that lead is poisonous that they began to look for alternatives but the fact remains that lead paint adheres better than many paints being used now. You think the energy from the Sun is free, but you (and others like you) don't consider what's involved in making solar panels and windmills.

You don't know much about science, do you? Your reading comprehension could use some work, too. When I wrote "How, exactly, do you think electric cars are made...", you responded with "I would imagine they are made in factories.". Show me a factory that doesn't use oil. That's like answering "What kind of car do you drive?" with "A blue one".

BTW- Japan still kills whales for a variety of byproducts, so it's not over. It's totally stupid that they still do this, but....

I'm not arguing that we should get off of the Oil horse, but the fact is, it's the single most useful substance on/in the planet. The energy density of oil derivatives is higher than most other fuels, they can be used for making medicine lubricants, plastics, paints, fabrics, solvents, etc and the ROI for the raw material, assuming it comes through peaceful means, is very low.

If the energy utilities hadn't been allowed to become as powerful as they are, it would be much easier to stop using them as our source of electricity, but they have a lot of clout in government. Given a choice, I would be disconnected from any source of electricity and natural gas, but in MKE, it's not easy to do that.

6+ Billion people on the planet and you think we can just drop oil as a main material for making almost every product being manufactured. Right. Let us know how that works, in your world.

Has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read. DO you really think ANY president can just press a button and launch???

Trump is a total buffoon, everybody with a brain knows this but Hillary isn't a savior! She's got her own agenda and is tied to big business and big banks. Is she the lesser of two evils? Maybe, but if so, not by much.

I don't envy you as your choices suck.

I think that the practical position is:

1. Oil has always been a political stone around our neck
2. It's a limited resource while new babies probably aren't going away any time soon
3. The less we are dependent on it, the better
4. The Saudis can't suddenly start pumping sunshine like crazy and destroy our native energy production efforts
5. Yeh, we'd still need oil for manufacturing various things. But, that's probably a fairly limited amount compared to what we burn in vehicles every year.
6. Consider what would happen to the price of those other products if the oil they still need were a 10th the price because the vehicle demand for oil was much lower than it is now.
7. For those things we do still need oil for, it would be around for those needs for far longer, and cost a lot less as well.
8. Instead of making the economic and political position of the folks sitting on the remaining oil ever greater over the next century, why not try to reduce it as much as possible, even if you don't care what the air our great grand children will breath is like.
9. Yes, you do still need to generate energy to charge electric cars, but that's something that could be done more and more on a local, renewable basis. Maybe we can't get long haul freight onto electric for some time, but if most folks had an electric car and solar panels on their house to help charge it, the difference would be massive to our oil dependence.

So, the obvious answer is push as hard on renewables as is practical. Incentivize it very heavily. That's a legitimate function of the government, to help get technologies that would be very good for us in the long run over that economies of scale hump into self-sustaining positive cycle.

So, a gas vehicle is not affected going uphill either? Gas vehicles can magically avoid the loss of efficiency of fighting gravity / but e-vehicles cannot? Hmmmm fascinating.

Did you learn this at TRUMP University?

Fins then said:
But congratulations to your landlord. He wasted his money, but he gets to feel warm and fuzzy while doing it. i have a friend that sells and installs alternative energy systems and offers other products to make homes more efficient. I asked him real world numbers one day on solar. It still is not a net gain for the end customer. The only real plus is that people buying solar systems are driving the market to make them more efficient and cheaper to manufacturer.

Mr. Stanley said:
Well, she is generating enough solar energy to sell some BACK to the power company / power-grid.

In Seattle, due to weather conditions, there is on the average, an 8 year payback / break even point on the initial investment, but after that, it's pure gravy---so your expert solar friend is ill informed, I'm sorry to report. If people buying solar now, are driving the market to make the panels cheaper, and improving technology and efficiency of the panels, is that a BAD thing?

Are solar panels undermining the ground stability and polluting drinking water and causing earthquakes - like Fracking?

"Keep on Fracking in the Free-World"... or was it...Rocking?

The pay/back break even period in sunnier climates is less.

Has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read. DO you really think ANY president can just press a button and launch???

Trump is a total buffoon, everybody with a brain knows this but Hillary isn't a savior! She's got her own agenda and is tied to big business and big banks. Is she the lesser of two evils? Maybe, but if so, not by much.

I don't envy you as your choices suck.

Bruce, I live in sunny Calif without grey skies and my friends in the solar business claim an 8 year payback here. I imagine googling how many sunny days per year in Seattle and Los Angeles you will find someone in Seattle exaggerating on the payback. If 10,12,15 years then at some point the panels may have issues. Does anything last forever?

Bruce, I live in sunny Calif without grey skies and my friends in the solar business claim an 8 year payback here. I imagine googling how many sunny days per year in Seattle and Los Angeles you will find someone in Seattle exaggerating on the payback. If 10,12,15 years then at some point the panels may have issues. Does anything last forever?

8 seems very quick. I'm s that just basic panels and feeding the power back to the grid when you aren't using it? I guess it's also based on California's high price for energy. Most information I've gotten from articles and people selling systems, put the number closer to 20 years, especially if you include batteries and inverters. And then the problem is 20 years is the about the life expectancy of the equipment.

I feel bad because I've read many of your posts and never once asked how it was smoking crack with Sig and swimming with dolphins!

You people who worry about the fossil fuels are such suckers.... there is no short supply of oil in the world as it is all manufactured scarcity, so as to keep certain governments and corporations rich and in power.

[Link: principia-scientific.org]

Just like diamonds - the only thing making diamonds valuable is manufactured scarcity and monopoly tactics by De Beers.

The pro-CNG argument is driven primarily by the CNG industry. Not people who acknowledge the science of climate change and accept the reality that we're cooking ourselves. CNG is marginally better than oil but it still releases carbon.

The other point you made appears to be a minimizing fallacy: water vapor is the main contributor as there's way more of it, therefore carbon isn't a big deal.

[Link: skepticalscience.com]

When skeptics use this argument, they are trying to imply that an increase in CO2 isn't a major problem. If CO2 isn't as powerful as water vapor, which there's already a lot of, adding a little more CO2 couldn't be that bad, right? What this argument misses is the fact that water vapor creates what scientists call a 'positive feedback loop' in the atmosphere — making any temperature changes larger than they would be otherwise.

The point that many others are making is basically a childish redirect: if you believe in climate change stop driving a car and using fossil fuels. It's not a reasonable talking point: it's an effort to stop a discussion.