Looking at the comments to the original article that triggered mine, I see most (all) commenters other than me think the NRC report is a bunch of crap, done by incompetent government buffoons who are cranking out reports to please their corporate masters.
And that may be true!
They also suggest that the price of gasoline is going to skyrocket as China and India add billions of new drivers to the world's highways. That may also be true. They further suggest that battery technology will progress at a much faster rate than what the report assumes, that there are any number of jaw dropping breakthroughs in technology just over the next horizon and that soon our cars will be net energy exporters and we will all be selling our excess electricity back to the grid. That may also be true.
I will acknowledge that figures lie and liars figure. I will also acknowledge that industry HAS been know to influence the results of government funded research. All that being said, however, our government seems to have taken up the cause of the plug-in hybrid with a degree of zeal that makes me suspicious. Maybe I am just a suspicious fellow. But I have a lifetime of experience with half witted and hare brained government programs to substantiate my paranoid tendencies.
The European manufacturers are scratching their heads trying to figure out just why our government is buying in so completely to the plug-in program. They have lots of cars available that reasonably priced and super efficient compared to ours. But they can't sell them here because the public perception is that only plug-ins are the answer, even though the vast majority of folks don't even know what the question is.
My brief is this. I don't give a rat's ass about global warming, green house gasses or holes in the ozone. Whatever damage has been done is impossible to reverse in my lifetime and frankly, my lifetime is, per force, pretty much what is most important to me. What I want to see happen is for America to turn all those supertankers around, send them back where they came from, pump the oil back under the sand. We can do that by dramatically raising the average fuel economy of ALL vehicles within our borders with a mix of plug-ins, fuel cells, photovoltaics, diesels, diesel hybrids and the use of fuels from non-food sources. Then we could close our military bases in all 127 countries around the globe where we presently have American soldiers stationed primarily to guarantee the continued flow of cheap oil, bring our military home and focus our resources on rebuilding the crumbling American infrastructure, providing an environment for all our citizens that promotes a healthy and happy life style and getting the government out of our bedrooms, out of our medical records, and out of our thought processes so that we can all get on with the "purfuit of happineff" guaranteed to us by the Constitution.
Is that too much to ask?
