If too many easy victories makes one insane then we have a lot to fear from Obama.

I'll worry about that if and when I see Obama winning lots of easy victories.

However, your observation is pertinent to our previous president, who had a congress that gave him everything he wanted and media that cheered him along every step of the way.

How many lives will be lost if we don't mitigate our emissions?

Perhaps a better question: How much worse will our economy get if we don't mitigate our trade deficit?

The CAFE standards are just a complicated and corruptible way to do what a tax would do much better.

Perhaps, but try getting any bill to increase taxes passed in a Senate that still has enough Republican and "blue dog" votes to defeat a cloture vote.

I'm also not convinced that taxes aren't corruptible. Evading taxes seems to be a national passtime, particularly among people who have enough money to buy hummers even when gas is over $4/gallon.

Kids often get angry when they're punished, even when they know they shouldn't have done the things they did to deserve the punishment. Spoiled brats are the most likely to react in this manner.

It may be more complicated than that, of course.

There's a difficult-to-quantify factor: Driver aggression seems to increase with the size of the vehicle.

I totally don't understand why...

...credit card companies should be dependent on these penalty fees.

It's because of the common American business mindset: There's no such thing as "reasonable" profit. The only kind of profit that any executive wants to hear about is maximal profit.

"Today we are declaring an end to the era of Republicans looking backward,"

That's the spirit: Don't try to figure out what you did wrong. Don't even consider the possibility that you might have done something wrong. Just pretend everything's hunky-dory and continue doing the same things that got you into your present situation. Maybe you just have to do more of it, and do it harder. Be more conservative, and don't tolerate any deviations from dogma.

For example, don't just demand another tax cut for wealthy people, instead demand that the government pay them for being so magnificent. You can get the money by diverting all Social Security and Medicare payments. And don't forget to demand that we start more wars. Forget about this nonsense of buying oil, we should invade every OPEC country and help ourselves. Just remember to teach the troops to sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" while they slaughter Muslims.

There's so much to do. Get cracking, time's a-wasting.

Again the responsible will have to subsidize the irresponsible. Please explain to me again why this is a good thing?

It's The American Way. Irresponsible people help Wall Streeters line their pockets, so we certainly can't do anything to discourage them.

as the cliff, their doom, came towards,

"and the corner has been turned."

Stepping off the edge of a cliff is a way to turn a corner.

The idea that electric cars are the 'da wave of da fuucha!' would be more palatable if you leftoids hadn't killed atomic energy back in the 80's throughout today ...

I seem to recall that the anti-nuclear "jihad" was mostly organized and funded by the fossil fuels industry.

As a resident of a 19th floor apt. in NYC, I ask, will the electric autos be small enough to get onto an elevator so it can be charged in my apt. overnight?

You might deliberately made this sound absurd to make a point, but don't ignore the benefit: Think of how much time you'd save by not having to look for parking spaces.

The big problem is that most Americans' lives are not designed for best energy efficiency. Jobs, schools and other activities require trips of several miles at least for most folks.

I didn't have much to say about where these things were located. Many employers in my area have "campus" offices out in the country that are very nice to look at but hopelessly distant from any kind of public transportation service.

Perhaps a fairer statement would be that most of America wasn't designed for best energy efficiency. We've spent at least 50 years building infrastructure that assumed that automobile transportation would remain cheap forever.

In a better world we'd have a motor pool of different vehicles available, and we'd choose the vehicle most suited to the particular trip. But that would take several vehicles per family, which would simply cost more than most people could afford.

How do we fix that?

That might be amenable to a plain old-fashioned business solution.

Short-term car rentals are a pain in the butt because of all the time-consuming paperwork. Longer-term rentals are typically for continuous use of a single vehicle.

A rental company that offered longer-term arrangements for intermittent use of various vehicles might do fairly well. A customer could park their little electric vehicle in the provided parking lot, present a card, and then drive away in an appropriate other vehicle a few minutes later.

And yet, the rump Republican party controls the Democratic party.

Or perhaps it's a matter of both parties being controlled by the same behind-the-curtain people.

I'm relatively sure that electric or otherwise-powered cars will eventually be used on a wide scale, but only after we run out of hydrocarbons or that the cost of mining/refining becomes more expensive than plant-produced electricity.

I think we have to be ahead of the curve on this one.

We'll be in really deep trouble if we don't start building alternative infrastructure before we run out of oil. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if we suddenly lost the use of gasoline-powered automobiles and had a ten+ year wait before anything else was practical.