I donated about two weeks ago, $120

Wonderland, ONLY you used insults and responded with not even ONE fact. I showed you the facts and you could care less. You just bury your head in the sand, with some nutty greenie religion precepts according to which you would happily sentence 6 billion people to their deaths, rather than face the truth about your religious beliefs. Do you volunteer to die as well? In fact your belief guarantees only two options:

1) total economic collapse, failed states worldwide, hoards of roaming, starving people, with nothing to lose who will burn, pillage, slaughter any and all fish, wildlife, plants, trees, turning the world into a virtual wasteland, OR

2) Current world policy (including Obama) which = burn-baby-burn until we have no more coal, oil & gas left to burn and the skies are dark with pollution, 100's of millions dead from fossil fuel emissions, runaway global warming, vast migrations of populations and of course inevitably that will lead to #1 again.

Only rational & feasible alternative to #1 & #2 is a switch to a nuclear powered economy. Something that your big oil buddies & their bankster overseers despise, since they know very well only Nuclear is capable of ending their energy hegemony.

You are indeed a stooge of the ruling elites.

Thanks for the reminder Thom, just donated.

If you have time to actually read this...I called re. ACA today and there wasn't time to make my case and Shano didn't have a mic. For years, the LGBT community has looked at the law of civil marriage and the 14th amend. & felt denied of equal protection of the law. SCOTUS just ruled in our favor. With regard to a class of people, how do federal laws regarding civil marriage pertain to all LGBT people across the states whereas the laws pertaining to the ACA do not pertain to all poor people across the states under the equal protection clause, particularly when it specificly says; "no state shall deny equal protection of the laws"? My sister lives in NC and I can assure you she is denied equal protection! If Shano could explain this on a future program, it would be most helpful..thanks

Instant runoff -- What you are describing sounds like the reason to be a corporation i.e. LLC. $18.6 billion sounds like a drop in the bucket. BP agreed to $25 billion for one oil well explosion. They accepted that number because it seemed so much less than what it cost them if they went to court. I think at least $1 trillion might have helped.

How do they determine what land is arable? Hemp grows were other things do not. Who says switchgrass is the most energy efficient? I have heard sugar beets are the most energy efficient. However, the arable land for sugar beet is way too little. When one combines arable land with energy efficiency I have heard hemp is the winner. I wonder if we would supply twice the necessary energy with biofuel if counted the arable land for hemp.

The high cost of energy in Germany indicates that the market is solving the problem. It reminds me of my statement about making the cost of gasoline $14/gallon.

Remember when prices become lower, it indicates the economy is collapsing. For example, the lower price of gasoline we have been witnessing has been identified as one of the causes of negative growth during the winter months.

Ou812 is dead on about Price-Anderson. Contrary to the hype in the MSM & Greenpeace, these insurance liability limit legislations are ubiquitous in industry. Weapons manufacturers & carbon capture get 100% liability protection. Aircraft max $1B for the nuclear bomb sized Airbus 380. Oil rigs were limited to $85M public liability. And all industry is protected to the level of bancruptcy. Oil train explosion at Lac Magentic, 49 people burned alive, city town center incinerated, thousands of tons of carcinogens released, small rail company just declared bancruptcy. The list is long. Note that unlike these other cases, Nuclear energy can save the world from runaway global warming and high energy cost --> economic collapse, starvation and a world of failed states. You would think that ALL progressives would care about that.

Your biomass is just another fantasy. If you converted all currently utilized arable land in North America to the highest yield switchgrass production, it would not even supply 1/3rd of United States current energy consumption. And that comes with major additional caveats. Like transportation difficulties, water shortages, fertilizer shortages, low efficiency, low EROEI. Not just impractical, but flatly impossible. Give up on pipe dreams.

Here is a good article for you to learn about the harsh reality of biomass & biofuels. Called a "crazy idea". Alice Friedemann:

http://energyskeptic.com/2015/peaksoil/

Thanks, chuckle8. I asked the question of how the 2nd Amdt. should be rewritten on the old version of Thom's website, and I got 10 pages of people saying it didn't need rewriting because it's perfectly clear and everyone but them interprets it wrong. Ha!

It's not just conservative so-called "Bible Christian" Protestants who engage in "cherry picking" Scripture to "prove their (talking) points." Take it from a Catholic blogger who's seen how the Cafeteria Catholics (from both liberal and especially of late importance, conservative ranks) the latter are proving themselves to be just as much a nuisance to their Church's attempts to get its message out as Pax Christi had been in the past. Only the conservative cherry-picking cafeteria Catholics have made it known they only care to pick their cherries from the most select orchards and speak only to their already converted believers in the age old nonsense that if an idea, any idea is good for business, it's good for America and good for the world. They've got a long way to go. A real long road. When the bigshots of Home Depot are singing the same hymns of the Koch Brothers (who supply HD'S and many other hardware/lumber stores, big and small) it's time to start singing other hyms from the other side.

Mark S -- It seems to me this is the battle between the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution. I think the only reason the South wanted to go back to a form of government like the "Articles of Confederation" is because they forgot how bad it was. As Charles Darwin pointed out the most successful species is the one that uses "love and co-operation".

Chuckles, You are not interested in contributing to this conversation, if you were, you would'nt make up stuff. Fuel Cells are not storage devices, but an expensive alternative to generating electricity. You disagree with the 5%-6% of total electricty generated by PV in Germany, but offer no proof. The real kicker, is your promotion of hemp. Why hemp? Why not ethanol, or wood. Much more BTU's are generated from burning wood than burning hemp, which means less has to be burned to produce an equal amount of heat. Also, if you want CO2 net zero, why not plant an amount of trees equal to the amount of fossil fuels burned.

I won't even address the ridiculous argument about the nuclear industry hiding information.

How will tax and rebate open the marketplace? We've had federal and state rebates on PV for several years. The Price-Anderson Act requires the nuclear energy industry to maintain liability insurance to compensenate the public in the event of a nuclear accident. How will repealing it allow the marketplace to run more freely?

You ask others for sources and proof, wheres's yours? I suspect you have none. You make up most of this stuff.

"If only that stew had just been a bit thinner, maybe some of our Senators would have seen clean through it!" ..Woody! ... greed and power...time for change! "All you Fascists bound to lose!"

Thom, you really went too far this time. The Japanese might've thought that Tojo was God but to say that most Germans thought Hitler was Jesus is just wildly false.
My family comes from that area of Europe, I had two uncles who served in the German army in WW II, I was brought up to admire Hitler, mistrust the Jews and look down on foreign nations and peoples. I was sent to special schools where I was taught that popular versions of history and current events were distorted and manipulated by the Jews controlling the press and the Jews that had disproportionate presence and influence in the State Department. It was commonly believed in our exile community that the U.S. and Britain fought on the "wrong" side of the war because Roosevelt and Churchill were Jews ( they both had a close antecedent - one of their mothers, in fact - with a Jewish sounding surname, apparently Nazis go by a "one drop rule" about that).
I went to high school in West Germany in the '70s where there was a very strong anti Nazi, "Never again!" sentiment that persists 'til this day and back here in the States I knew many in our exile community, young and old, who espoused the purest, most traditional form of Nazi philosophy.
In all of my contact with and immersion in Germanic culture and the society of WW II veterans and refugees, NEVER did I ever know or even hear of ANYBODY who believed Hitler was Jesus Christ or his reincarnation. You really hurt your credibility - and our movements - when you embellish like that. If you keep doing that you'll be known as "that crazy lefty on the radio" and "lefty" will become synonymous with "crazy".
What was at work in Germany in WW II was simply the wounded nationalism of the Germans and their indignation at the punitive sanctions from the Allied Powers after WW I. Excessive nationalism and nationalistic chauvinism always need a scapegoat or a perceived "enemy within" as well as without. Thus racial and nationalistic hatred are always necessarily the flip side of such obsessive nationalistic conceit.
Before WW II and the Nuremberg trials EVERYBODY was a Nazi, the nationalism, racism, antisemitism and militarism of Germany wasn't that different from those of Britain, France, Belgium, Poland, Russia, etc..
The same was true even in the new United States. I once heard someone ask how the United States could've tolerated the formation of the KKK in the early part of the 20th Century. The answer was that MANY organizations in the U.S. in 1915 didn't accept membership of blacks, Jews or Catholics and many of those often militated against those groups in some way. It was not at all uncommon. It wasn't until the shock and outrage of the discovery of the death camps and the revelations of the Nuremberg trials - and the generations born after WW II and Nuremberg finding voice - that that began to change.
Until then racial and religious intolerance were the rule and tolerance the rare exception. That was also because there was much invested in those attitudes. The relatively extravagant living standards of Europe and the United States depended upon the colonialism - which the U.S. also practiced, as much as any other Western power only not as overtly. Europe, openly and without guile, conquered and subjugated foreign people who were less technologically developed, darker skinned and not Western in their culture and religion and continued indefinitely to plunder them their natural material and human resources. The U.S., on the other hand, pretended to respect the self determination of such peoples but in reality kept them under the heel of, ostensibly independent but actual, puppet governments that Washington controlled. It also wasn't until after WW II that this too began to change, not only because conquest, racism and nationalism fell out of moral favor after Nuremberg but also because the major colonial powers were greatly weakened by the war so the colonized peoples saw their opportunity. They were aided by the Soviets, whose founding Leninist philosophy declared, as among its cornerstones, the right of self determination of all ethnic groups, as well as by those forementioned post Nuremberg generations of the West.
The issue of the Confederacy was also one of nationalism and there is an element of truth in the claim that they weren't fighting to defend slavery but because they didn't appreciate a "foreign" government telling them what to do. Conversely, Lincoln had said that he wasn't fighting to abolish slavery but to maintain the union and that if he could've done so without freeing a single slave he would've.
In the 1940s, one Southern youth explained. "The way I was brought up, I always felt, I don't know why, that something bad would happen to the South if I treated a black person as my social equal.". There may well have been a reaction of stubborn defiance among Southerners to an "outside" authority telling them how to behave - but I'm not sure I care.