Robert Tracinski writing on the electic car, that preposterous amalgam of fossil fuel snobbery and environmental ignorance foisted on Americans by modern green alchemists who seem to think fuel, in the form of electricity, miraculously appears in your house from the "ether".
Electric cars never really made any sense. They are cloaked in the sanctimony of the green movement, because they don't use nasty fossil fuels like gasoline. Instead, they use electricity, which is sent out through power lines from big power plants, which generate this electricity—how? Oh yes, by burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. This is known as the "long tailpipe," which goes from the car charging up in your garage all the way back to the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant. And don't forget, electric cars also have giant batteries made from nasty toxic metals like lithium and cobalt, the manufacture of which frontloads carbon dioxide emissions.
So the electric car was always more an exercise in green paternalism—it is the future, as selected for us by our betters—than a serious attempt to solve any real or imagined problem.
And after discussing the Tesla and it's less-than-road-worthiness:
But this misses the biggest point: since when is driving a car supposed to be so complicated? The whole point of technology is to use the machine's energy and yes, to burn up natural resources, in order to save human effort. The machines are supposed to work for us; we don't work for them. This is especially true of the automobile, which is all about freedom, independence, going out on the open road and deciding on the spur of the moment where you want to go—not about filing a flight plan and having technicians talk you through your trip.
Read the whole thing at Real Clear Politics.
