How I dearly wish they would stop calling them "zero emmision vechicles".
If there was FIRST an effort to move off of using coal for electricity and SECOND a move to use electricity for cars then I would say WHAT A GREAT SOLUTION! but as-is it's a joke believed only by retards who don't pay any attention to the fact that 56% of the electricity in the US comes from burning coal.
The Other Fossil Fuel (link)...skip...
Corey Powell's review (link) of
Big Coal (link) for the New York Times starts off with as concise a summary of coal's place in modern civilization as one could ask for:
There is perhaps no greater act of denial in modern life than sticking a plug into an electric outlet. No thinking person can eat a hamburger without knowing it was once a cow, or drink water from the tap without recognizing, at least dimly, that its journey began in some distant reservoir. Electricity is different. Fully sanitized of any hint of its origins, it pours out of the socket almost like magic.
In his new book, Jeff Goodell breaks the spell with a single number: 20. That's how many pounds of coal each person in the United States consumes, on average, every day to keep the electricity flowing. Despite its outdated image, coal generates half of our electricity, far more than any other source. Demand keeps rising, thanks in part to our appetite for new electronic gadgets and appliances; with nuclear power on hold and natural gas supplies tightening, coal's importance is only going to increase. As Goodell puts it, "our shiny white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks."
Coal has become near-synonymous with electricity because it is cheap and abundant. A pile of coal containing one million B.T.U.'s worth of energy costs $1.70. The equivalent amount of natural gas runs about $9. All electricity looks the same, so why pay more?
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