Friday, August 13, 2010

Electric Cars Aren't Green!

The Chevy Volt, The Next Big Hybrid, is getting a lot of buzz.



The Nissan Leaf, the first all electric plug-in auto is up next in the batting circle.



In the wake of BP's crude splooge in the Golf of Mexico, everyone is clamoring to dump their fossil fuel powered vehicles and jump on the electric car bandwagon.

But electric cars are just the latest cup covering the unavoidable fossil fuel pea in an elaborate environmental shell game.



OK, so you buy your electric car and free yourself from fossil fuels thus reducing your carbon footprint, slow Global Climate Change and make the world a better place. You can feel good about yourself and look disdainfully upon those gas-guzzling, JO Co, SUV driving bastards.

WRONG!

Where do you think electricity comes from? It's not transmitted through the ether to your home through unicorn horns and rainbows.



Almost 70% of electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels! All electric cars do is cause us to burn more coal to generate more electricity.

Sure, you can load up your recyclables in your electric car and brag about how you don't have to pay $50 to fill up your gas tank any more. "I just plug it in and recharge it!"

But now your electric bill has gone from a couple of hundred dollars a month to double that because your car is sucking on your electric tit all night long, drinking electricity generated by burning coal!

You can be all smug about driving a "zero-emissions" car that doesn't even have a tailpipe, but the local utility company's power plants spewed tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to generate the electricity that powers your "zero-emission" vehicle.

The only way that electric vehicles make any sense is if we transition away from electricity generated by coal and natural gas to electricity generated by solar, wind, geothermal and tidal forces.

Until then, electric car buyers are just masturbating to images of Ed Begley, Jr. while continuing to kill the planet.

6 comments:

Tim said...

The premise of your article I am afraid is wrong. Better place's first two places of putting in their Network are using renewables - in Israel - Solar Power, in Denmark - Wind Generation

I Travel for JOOLS said...

We have more natural gas in this country than the Saudis have oil. I agree with Pickens that we are one card short of a deck for not utilizing this resource, including as a fuel for cars.

I won't be spending $40,000+ for a 4 passenger vehicle which wouldn't even get me to XO's house and back without a charge and neither will the rest of the country.

FletcherDodge said...

The good news is that, according to my inside sources, they're testing a new car that runs only on water. The caveat is that it has to be water from the gulf of Mexico.

Dan said...

Jools - the rest of the country doesn't want to go to XO's house, so I don't see why that's relevant. Just sayin' . . .

Radioman KC said...

Great post. Coal's dirty but keeps the trains running. We need nuke power and those take a long time to build. Powerplants aren't made by the Polaroid Company! Grid's already short. We don't start building power plants, we wont' have the electricity if they catch on.

One good thing, the Chinese won't be building our power plants.

KClowlife said...

Yeah, you pretty much missed a lot of facts in this post XO. Is coal a significant source of power you can buy in the middle of the nation? Yes. But you can choose to obtain your electric in other methods. And not everyone lives in the middle of America. On the coasts, the power is much friendlier to the environment.

Also, even coal, power plants generate more power with less pollution due to economies of scale. You can only spend so much money to scrub the exhaust of a car. But at a power plant you can burn the fuel source more efficiently(hotter) and produce less byproducts that need to be scrubbed. You can also scrub the exhaust of a power plant more thoroughly than you can at a power plant. Finally, regulation at power plants is managed more efficiently than guys at muffler shops who cut off catalytic converters once they rust out.

I'm normally a fan, but you kind of screwed the pooch on this one.