Your Coal-fired Electric Car

By James Lewis

Rush Limbaugh has coined some of the best words for saving our PC-corrupted public language, but I think this gem should be remembered: Rush says that electric cars are "coal-fired."

Which is exactly correct, and it's funny, too.

Millions of bubble brains in the media think the GM Volt is supposed to be the answer to our energy needs. It is of course a fraud, as GM actually admitted after it hyped the new Volt. It's not a "hybrid electric," as GM lied to the hearty applause of Obama and the New York Times. Rather it's a gas-powered car for 340 miles per tank, and you can run it for 40 miles on batteries that will have to be replaced when they stop taking a charge, as batteries do. That's why your laptop battery has to be replaced after a while. And it will cost you $ 41,000.00 to snoot out the other Green suckers.

But the real fallacy, as Rush points out, is that electrical energy for your hypemobile has to come from somewhere. It's a scientific law called the Conservation of Energy. You start out with 10 million ergs and turn it into 40 miles of driving your putt-putt down the highway. You lose half of your original energy at every step in the chain from your coal-fired generator plant to the rubber wheels moving your shiny new Volt.

In most of the world electrical energy comes from coal, with a lot less from nuclear. Both of those are sinful energy sources. The Greenies imagine the planet slowly dying from all that stuff. But that little Volt you drive around is really fired by electricity from a carbon energy source: coal. It's the "coal-fired car." And it's China that is now building coal-fired plants fast enough to outpace the rest of the world. That's because the Chinese power class listens to engineers, not ignorant headline writers.

Rush dropped that phrase a few weeks ago, and I hope it doesn't disappear down the vast collective memory hole, because "coal-fired" tells the exact truth.

It takes all the steam out of the hypemobile.

It's your coal-fired GM Volt.

Pass it on.