Appreciate your take on this, but one of the main points that I wanted to bring up from this article is the source of fuel for electric cars -- as it is for most of the electricity in the USA -- primarily comes from burning coal. It's easy to think we aren't causing environmental problems when the carbon isn't coming out of our tailpipe, but the problem is the environmental impact has already occured upstream. Legislation that addresses only the last piece of the chain while ignoring the upstream issue may end up actually harming the environment more than helping it, which I'd rather avoid than "learn" the hard way. Also, any actions in California are irrelevant compared to the potential effects of 100M+ new gasoline-burning cars in China over the next 5 years.

I also noticed that almost all of these empires originated in either modern day Turkey or moden day Iraq & Iran. Every 2nd or 3rd empire seems to be someone from the outside (Rome, Mongolia, etc) but the next empire is the Turks or Iraqi/Iranians re-establishing themselves (at least until the last iteration of nation states; it will be interesting to see if the Arab spring events end up redrawing or consolidating current areas). And yes, the borders are absolutely positively random, rarely following natural borders (rivers, mountains) or ethnic clans (Kurds being a prime example).