Electric cars

I just finished watching the weekly show put on by the Wall Street Journal. These are people, mostly conservatives, who are well educated and worldly but you wouldn’t know it from today’s segment on electric cars. First they suggested that maybe the energy used to charge the car may have come from a CO2 producing source like coal, oil or natural gas. Please be advised that 80 of our electrical power comes from those three sources. How could they not know that? Second even if you had a power supply at all the gas stations around the county the Nissan Leaf goes 75 miles on a charge and then it must recharge overnight. This of course assumes you are not driving in a Minneapolis winter where you just might want to use your car heater. Can you imagine taking a trip in that car? Third it takes twice as much energy to make an electric car so it has already used up most of its savings before it leaves the manufacturer. Forth, batteries have an 8 year life span and with a $15,000 replacement cost you might consider that the end of the car.