I imagine the comment thread will be well worth reading.

Sustainability, baby!

That results in an offshore ‘wind farm’ 2000 miles long by at least 20 miles deep, with the blade tips reaching over 500 feet in the air.”

Related – MPAC documents show some Wolfe Island property values plummet by over $100,000

The sound of censored science;

Unlike their coverage of the political establishment or the corporate establishment, journalists will rarely be skeptical of the scientific establishment. Perhaps these ­unskeptical journalists don’t question scientists out of a belief that scientists’ pronouncements are free of the self-interest that taints politicians or corporations. Or perhaps these journalists, who are themselves rarely scientifically literate, blindly accept the views of scientific authority figures because they lack the training to assess rival views. Or perhaps these journalists fear being subjected to ridicule if they buck politically correct views. Whatever the reasons for journalistic deference to dogma in science, the victim is the information-consuming public, which at best is kept in the dark, at worst is duped.

All of which boils down to “lazy and stupid”.
h/t Ken (Kulak)

Really:

The $474,000 GM job

Update: Plus:

The strange budget priorities of Obama: Subsidizing car purchases for the 1% over poor children and airline safety

Meanwhile non-luxury Euro car makers are in trouble, especially Fiat (the proud owner of Chrysler which is in effect saving the Italian parent); VW–“slightly premium”–is however doing well, Ford is surprisingly not mentioned:

Too many cars, too few buyers

Nice charts. And note that Peugeot…

…is also worryingly dependent on selling cars in kit form to Iran, which account for 13% of Peugeot’s sales (compared with around 6% for Renault), and which would be vulnerable to any conflict over Iran’s nuclear programme…

WUWT;

After I showed the original press release contained not one mention of “global warming” or “climate change”, one of our readers decided to ask the researcher about this statement attributed to to Jessica Morgan in that Business Insider story…

…on the Arctic Ocean’s fertile littoral:

Hon. Gerry Ritz…this government is very strong and very solid with Canadian farmers and with the Canadian farm sector, coast to coast to coast…

Don’t politicians ever think before they spout politically correct slogans?
Predate: For American readers I should have identified Mr Ritz as the Canadian federal Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.

Sooner and sooner:

Who had the worst week in Washington? BlackBerrys
…
Capitol Hill, the center of the BlackBerry universe and a symbolic Alamo standing against an overwhelming iPhone army, ground to a halt…
…perhaps most impactfully, for many BlackBerry users, those of us who have long fought the good fight against the cultural coolness of all things Apple, the outage amounted to a final indignity. That, and the fact the new iPhone 4s came out on Friday [Oct. 14], of course…

Earlier:

Why the Berry’s Future May be Black

…why Dick and Jane aren’t numerate. Margaret “Privileged” Wente:

Too many teachers can’t do math, let alone teach it
…
Unfortunately, the people who educate the educators sound like the wacky wing of the NDP. Here’s Fern Snart, the dean of education at the University of Alberta: “To educate students beyond the superficial,” she writes, “we must engage them in transformational processes and deep thinking such that they understand the Western position of privilege that is often reflected in issues of diversity, power, and justice, and that they move to an internalization of responsibility related to this privilege.”
No wonder little Emma doesn’t know her times tables. She’s way too busy learning how her Western position of privilege entrenches gender relations. Or something like that…

More on modern, er, educators:

Rhizomatic?

Well, well, well–this story from the Gray Lady, which hates the Canadian “tar sands“:

New Fields May Propel Americas to Top of Oil Companies’ Lists
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil has begun building its first nuclear submarine to protect its vast, new offshore oil discoveries. Colombia’s oil production is climbing so fast that it is closing in on Algeria’s and could hit Libya’s prewar levels in a few years. ExxonMobil is striking new deals in Argentina, which recently heralded its biggest oil discovery since the 1980s.
Up and down the Americas, it is a similar story: a Chinese-built rig is preparing to drill in Cuban waters; a Canadian official has suggested that unemployed Americans could move north to help fill tens of thousands of new jobs in Canada’s expanding oil sands; and one of the hemisphere’s hottest new oil pursuits is actually in the United States, at a shale formation in North Dakota’s prairie that is producing 400,000 barrels of oil a day and is part of a broader shift that could ease American dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
For the first time in decades, the emerging prize of global energy may be the Americas…

Meanwhile Bret Stephens of the Wall St. Journal looks across the sea with a rather dystopian lens:

What Comes After ‘Europe’?
The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued…

Gray Lady/WSJ predate:

Frack Whom?

…Dalton McGuinty about this shocking revelation from Spiegel Online:

Electric Car Revolution Remains a Distant Prospect

Update: Equal opportunity Publius for his part piles also on Timmy the Hudak:

The Incredible Mendacity of Dalton McGuinty
…The proposition to the voters of Ontario is vote out the generic looking lying bastard and replace him with another generic looking possibly lying bastard. I know what I’m voting against. What on earth am I voting for?..

Paul Wells of Maclean’s unearths some clear thinking from Stephen Harper’s former associate, Tom Flanagan:

…
…his big post-election analysis for the June Policy Options magazine (.pdf) is all about what we might now call the Persichilli phenomenon:

…
The Conservatives would still have a majority in 2011 even if they had won no seats at all in Quebec
…francophone nationalists always present a problem, even when they can be brought to offer support to the Conservatives. They tend to have an instrumental orientation toward the federal government, seeing it primarily as a source of benefits for Quebec. This raises resistance among other Conservatives, who fear they will have to pay for these benefits to Quebec. …
In practice, French support in Quebec for the Conservatives was always fragile. Think how easily the issue of ‘culture cuts’ dislodged Conservative supporters in Quebec in 2008, even after the Conservatives had built a beachhead into the province in 2006. By comparison, the support of ethnic voters in Toronto and other metropolitan areas seems more likely to be stable, precisely because the Conservatives have attracted those ethnic voters who were already most like themselves in terms of demographics and politics.”..

…of oil prices:

…
In a competitive market, the price of oil would be linked to the marginal cost of the next barrel. In other words, the price for the first 88 barrels would be affected by the cost of producing the 89th barrel, in effect the cost of replacing each barrel used.
But in the world of oil, it’s hard to say what that replacement cost is. Producing oil is not like churning out computer chips, where costs are similar everywhere.
In Canada, it costs somewhere between $40 and $60 a barrel to mine and melt the viscous goo known as tar sands that environmentalists would rather leave in the ground. Yet in the Gulf of Mexico, where giant drilling rigs plumb deep waters, the cost of finding and developing oilfields can be relatively modest. Chevron, for example, has a $7.5 billion platform that will tap into a half-billion-barrel field at an average cost of about $15 a barrel. In Iraq, it’s even cheaper…
…There is no free market. There are obstacles everywhere. Pipelines. Politics. Oil spills. Warfare. They make it hard to figure out a marginal price for the next barrel of oil because it’s not clear whether the cheapest barrel can get anywhere near a tanker, refinery or consumer.
Then there’s the demand side, where needs and habits are so ingrained that we don’t respond quickly to rising prices…
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is devoted to the idea of managing — or manipulating — oil markets.
Though Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi emerged from the cartel’s cantankerous June meeting and declared it the worst one ever, when it comes to oil prices, OPEC is having its best year ever…
Some argue that an era of limits has begun. Yes, there is a peak to world oil production out there somewhere, because we’re gobbling up the plants and plankton that have been simmering for millions of years in the sedimentary cooker faster than the Earth can replace them. But we keep postponing that peak — by finding new fields, getting more oil out of old ones or clamping down on consumption.
Still, supplies could remain tight because of fast consumption growth in China, where every year it’s increasing by more than half a million barrels a day, and in India. The world has about 3 million to 4 million barrels a day of spare capacity right now, but prices edge up when that cushion shrinks.
The only way to restore balance in coming years will be through higher prices…

Matt from Mississauga has kindly posted this hilarious discussion between John Robson and Brian Lilley:

Comparing Communist Europe (USSR excluded) with the Arab world. In 1989 those living in European Communist countries had a clear and attractive alternative to their regimes: Western European social democracy of various types, an alternative that from any rational, moral, economic and indeed emotional view (hard-core believing Communists excepted but they no longer dwelled in that part of the world) was obviously superior to present realities.
The wave of popular unrest now moving around the Arab world has, to use the obvious phrase, uncanny similarities in the underlying sameness of repressive conditions being rebelled against. Could Libya be the new Romania?
What is strikingly different is the absence of an obvious alternative model for government, economy and society in Arab countries. Where is the Arab EU model? As for other possibilities…
Update: Anne Applebaum draws another historical comparison:

In the Arab world, it’s 1848 – not 1989