As I understand it, Obama has been criticizing NAFTA while quietly giving Canada assurances that he's not going to screw with it.

There's no real contradiction here. It's not the US-Canada part of NAFTA that's messing with Ohio's economy, it's the US-Mexico aspect. The manufacturing jobs aren't going to Canada, they're going to Mexico.

It's perfectly reasonable for Obama, or any other candidate for that matter, to criticize NAFTA's effect on American workers while simultaneously reassuring Canada that we're not the problem.

Okay, HERE WE GO AGAIN. How do we keep all the cars going?

Yes, OKAY, FINE, the production and distribution grid can charge up that many cars if they all charge during off-peak hours. Take the total rated capacity of the entire power system (X gigawatts, or X gigajoules per second), multiply it by the amount of time (seconds), and you have the total energy it could produce. Then take the total amount of energy it does produce during the same time period. A minus B equals your spare capacity, equals enough to charge 1 million plug-in hybrids or whatever the fuck it is. In other words, the X gigawatts of generation capacity, if it was fully used during what are currently off-peak periods, could generate that much POWER.

But that power is meaningless if the ENERGY isn't there. Running those power plants at full capacity during what are currently off-peak hours means that they would be consuming fuel that whole time. Natural gas. In short supply. Already in depletion. Not making any more of it.

Talking about capacity when it's the primary energy that's the real bottleneck is like being in the desert with no water and saying, Don't worry, my canteen can hold fifty gallons! I can go for days.

A year ago How The World Works was talking about how biofuels could make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Hmm, very complex issue, lots of interesting discussion, scratching of heads, hmmm, could it, couldn't it, depends, hmmm.

One harvest into the earliest stages of a biofuel economy, food prices have skyrocketed. Food riots throughout the Third World. Grain stocks at a record low. Price of flour doubling. People are already going to starve and die because some people decided to treat the food vs. fuel debate as though it was an actual debate in which reasonable people with a grasp on reality might differ.

So, please. Pretty fucking please, Andrew, I beg of you. STOP trying to legitimize the ongoing pathological obsession with keeping ther cars running. Because every scheme--EVERY scheme--to keep doing so that has come up in the past thirty years has collapsed utterly as soon as someone looked at the actual constraining factor.

A gateway to a parallel universe! Giant meteor strikes Earth! Aliens invade and blow up the White House! The Climate Goes Berserk! These are all great concepts, summarily shat upon by Emmerich.

Initially the trailers for 10,000 BC triggered a hope/idea that it might be about the first Siberians to cross the Bering Strait into America. That could have been a good movie with real epic potential. But it goes without saying that with Emmerich involved, it would suck hard.

Obviously being involved in a sex scandal is enough to destroy someone's political career in America. Meanwhile, lying about WMD's, starting a disastrous war, allowing a major US city to be destroyed by a hurricane and failing to get even the most basic relief to the victims within a week... that's okay.

You people are making it very, very difficult indeed for those of us in the rest of the world to feel bad when something bad happens to you.

"So where are all the cornucopians? Feeling shy?

You should. You were wrong. You were always wrong. But I don't imagine we'll be getting any apologies. Cornucopians just skulk off and try to make it look like they weren't so unbelievably stupid."

I think they're hanging out with the global warming deniers, in the houses on the high ground that the latter bought with their "scholarly endowments" and "consultancy fees" from the fossil fuel industry.

'Are you sure you weren't followed?'

(looking nervously out the shuttered windows) 'Pretty sure. There was a crowd of people with rakes and tire irons walking behind me but I think they were looking for someone else.'