Also, let us remember that the electricity used by an electric car must come from somewhere. And in the US most of it comes from burning coal. Now we could use clean nuclear energy (whose waste is stored discretely in engineered facilities); but the environmentailset have blocked this at every turn, and only recently did any new applications to build nuclear power plants happen.

There is no “silver bullet” as the kumbaya crowd wants. We need to transition to cleaner FEASIBLE power (i.e. nuclear) first, while the less feasibles (wind, solar, fusion?!) incubate towards feasibility.

When the EV1 was being circulated GM only leased it, but as Mr. Friedman pointed out, the marginal costs of the car outweighed the benefits when the car was leased. If they were to make a decent profit–a profit that would make the EV1 self-sustaining GM would have had to sell it at a $35k starting price. And in that case the corperation would find it self with a large surplus of ugly looking electric cars on its hands.

The fact of the matter, the fact that environmentalists perpetually fail to acknowlege, is that oil is a commodity in such high demand around the world for a reason–because it is an excellent source of energy. Companies opperate by the profit motive. If supposed “alternative energies” were at all effective then we would see a great deal of investment in them, because they are productive and could turn a significant profit for the company.

This is not a conspiracy; this is how the free market works.