Cars, & gas....
Greener Cars. Enviro-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg explains why, taking all associated life-cycle costs into consideration, green cars are nowhere near the bargain they have been advertised as being:
...[T]he
production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable
emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.
So
unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead
environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the
Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting
long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging
takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a
bit faster than your average jogger.
To make matters worse, the
batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a
cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective
batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT
Technology Review cautioned last year: "Don't Drive Your Nissan Leaf
Too Much."
If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over
its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the
car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a
similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles.
Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly
from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of
almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it
is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.
Even
if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away
from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less
carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin. This is a far cry
from "zero emissions." Over its entire lifetime, the electric car will
be responsible for 8.7 tons of carbon dioxide less than the average
conventional car.
Lomborg sees a truly economical electric car as being at least two decades away.
GREEN ENERGY. At WSJ, James Taranto sees an "Otter policy"
from progressive quarters, as to the Keystone XL Canada-US pipeline,
channelling the anti-hero figure from the satirical classic Animal House
(1978): "I think that this situation absolutely requires a really
futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!" Given that
Canadian pipelines already supply 590,000 barrels of oil per day, the
illogic of opposing Keystone XL's 830,000 added barrels of oil appeals only to militant Greens. More illogic: Canadian oil being shipped by freight train instead of pipelines, despite higher risk of spillage.....
