This could be a good thing, actually. I believe most electric cars already have cooling and heating systems for their batteries. If you don't have to cool it as much, then you don't spend that battery life.

When I hear someone advocating cutting education spending in the US citing the fact that spending on educators is the top cost, I just feel like the whole point is being missed. The highest cost at most companies is their employees - and it should be, if you want to attract high quality employees. Some people have chosen to conflate their grudge against a few of their primary school teachers with making our education system better, and it's been extraordinarily popular, with little gain in anything measurable. We do need accountability in education. But we also need to spend on it like it's a national defense priority. My wife is a teacher, and I didn't realize until she started watching how much of the classroom comes out of the teacher's pocket. And the tax credit that teachers get (and almost lost) is such a laughably low amount.

Are you just summarizing the article?

A lot of the bumps in popularity right now are purely name recognition: People hear a list of names, and pick the one they recognize the most. As the election gets closer - and especially when debates happen - other names will become more popular. As khjuu mentioned, this same bump happened to other candidates, but goes away pretty quickly once the race gets serious (i.e. the primaries are finished).

Hans Rosling makes a good case that, as the world gets richer, the poor are getting richer, too. This obviously doesn't solve the poverty issue, but it is good evidence that we are, in fact, making a difference.