What is the problem with Electric Cars?

Answer: They need Electricity. This is a problem because that electricity has to be generated by some technology, in some real location, and transported from the locus of generation through the grid to the millions of outlet plugs where the owners of electric cars purpose to recharge their vehicles.

We have lots of hydroelectric dams, many of which are way past their “expiration dates” with tens of thousands of acre-feet of impounded water poised to ravage the downstream communities that have relentlessly shouldered their way up the river courses as developers and land-rapers sought virgin sites to parcel out to eager home-owners.

Look at California. Many of the hydroelectric dams are now cited by environmental groups who assert that the dams are anchored in seismically unstable landforms, or at least strata insufficiently studied. There are pressure groups opposed to any new dams on grounds of their effects on fish spawning and land fauna habitat degradation. There are other pressure groups who want to have existing dams demolished and carted away for the same reasons – “screw the humans.” And besides the nutball humans, there are real problems, such as the cycles of drought and flood that alternately enfeeble the dynamos and threaten to overwhelm the dams’ structural integrity.

And of course, fossil fuel generation of the electricity has the same problems for the environment whether the amps are powering vehicle or toothbrushes. The real advantage (that might sorta offset the inefficiency, maybe, kinda) were that the generating station represents an easier cleanup job because it’s a point-source rather that a diffuse set of infinitesimal pollution sources.

I’ve read that the Greens in Germany hold a sufficient portion of the Bundestag that they’ve managed to outlaw nuclear generation of electricity within the German borders. So they end up having to purchase a sizeable fraction of their electrical power from neighboring France, which generates close to 80 percent of its output from Nuclear facilities, thank you very much.

MORONS.

We have too many Morons here. The city of Berkeley has paid to have some very large highway signs made up and mounted at places where major thoroughfares enter their municipality, declaring that Berkeley is a Nuclear Free City.

Idiots.

Have they rejected the use of diagnostic and therapeutic radioisotopes? Cancer therapy by Cesium-137? Anti-static Polonium 210 brushes for photographer’s camera lenses? Where do they think these things come from?

Luddites.

Our country’s energy options will be crippled so long as a sizeable portion of the voting public cannot distinguish between a proton and a crouton.