Washington Post op-ed: “Electric cars and the liberal war with science”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0192
“Democrats and liberals are fond of calling their conservative and Republican adversaries ‘anti-science’,” writes the Washington Post ‘s Charles Lane in a 6 March op-ed. He stipulates that to “the extent that the right espouses ‘creation science,’ or disputes established facts about environmental degradation,” the label is “appropriate.” Nevertheless, he writes, “progressives’ fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy.”
These limitations “reflect stubborn scientific facts,” Lane says. He invokes physics to prove the point: “Petroleum packs a lot of energy per unit of volume. (Each liter contains 34 megajoules.) Consequently, gasoline makes a cheap, portable and convenient motor fuel.”
Lane presents data on Chevrolet’s plug-in electric Volt automobile to illustrate what he calls “the wasteful folly of allocating capital according to the dictates of politicians.” Despite a $7,500 federal tax rebate, the cars aren’t selling. This idles 1300 workers at a Chevrolet plant, Lane writes. He also reports 125 layoffs at Fisker Automotive, a builder of “expensive plug-in electric cars” and a recipient of a half-billion dollars in loans from the Energy Department.
Lane notes that green-energy advocates “insist that the government should help them crank up mass production of electric vehicles” and that they argue that economies of scale will eventually take hold. But “decades after the 1973 oil crisis,” he asserts, “this logic is wearing thin.” He continues:
Any company that figured out how to build a practical mass-market electric car would be swimming in cash. That no one has done so suggests we are bumping up against the limits of nature, not just politics or economics.
Lane proposes that the federal and private-enterprise dollars that have been spent on the electric-car effort might have been better used in “more plausible energy-efficiency efforts, such as advanced internal combustion engines.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.