Because feeling good about yourself is really all that matters

A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.

It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.

"If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely.

On the bright side of things, at least the demise (for now) of cap and trade will mean we will still have coal-fired plants in which to fire up and which will provide electricity to our death-trap smug-mobiles.

But if cap and trade does manage to resuscitate and effectively kill the coal industry, where is that electricity going to come from? Oh, that’s right. We’ve always got wind and solar power. Unfortunately, those two alternative energies are set with massive inherent drawbacks in their current stage of development.

T. Boone Pickens is sitting on 687 400-feet tall wind turbines as he scratched his plans to “plant” these things out in west Texas. His problem? Getting the power generated to the grid. You see, the fact of the matter with places that are really windy and really sunny (see also: hot), is that no one lives there and right now, the storage and transmission technology is not where it needs to be to in order for wind and solar to be market-competitive. And did we mention that these wind turbine farms have a tendency to make mincemeat of flocks of birds and that solar farms require a massive amount of water, something else in scant supply in hotter climes, in order to keep the panels clean.

Our push for electric power also pushes us further into the hands of some unsavory characters. Half the world’s proven lithium reserves reside in Bolivia whose leftist President is a Hugo Chavez ally.

Hey, we thought this whole alternative energy movement was, in part, so we didn’t have to do business with the planet’s jerk-offs. Sounds like we’re exchanging petrol-dictators for litho-dictators.

We continue charging down the government-mandated green revolution road pursuing these outlandish energy alternatives that aren’t ready for prime-time, do not produce a good return on investment and may in fact be more harmful to the environment than our traditional sources of energy and in the case of ethanol, wreak havoc with the world’s food supplies and prices.

It’s to the point where we are almost forced to cheer for these 300 page amendments that get snuck into bills like cap and trade as these back room deals and concessions signal that the proposed legislation is watered-down to the point of a net zero effect.

Since no one is really interested in the oil reserves setting beneath our feet or nuclear energy, a combination that is real energy indepence, this is all we got.