President Obama visited Michigan recently to talk about how he “saved” the auto industry. But what he really did was bail out the unions, pure and simple.

On his visit, Obama touted the Chevy Volt, an electric car which costs a whopping $41,000.

Americans really need to know the truth about the electric car. It is just more enviro nonsense. First, its high price tag means that it will need to be subsidized by the government which is just more wasteful eco-economics, where ‘green’ technologies are subsidized dollar for dollar by the taxpayer. So if your neighbor buys a Volt, you are paying for his car.

Does that make sense?

Of course not.

More importantly, however, the electric car will actually use more energy and cause more pollution than an internal combustion engine. Because electricity is a highly-refined resource that should be used to power computers, light bulbs, refrigerators, water pumps, power tools and the like. To move around heavy things like cars with one person in them is “the wrong use” for electricity.

Have you ever known people who use electricity to heat their house?

If you have, you will notice that they always talk about how expensive it is because heating a home is the “wrong use” for a refined resource like electricity.

Electricity is generated through a conversion process that dissipates a lot of ‘raw’ energy in order to produce a ‘refined’ form of energy. In a coal-fired power plant, coal is burned at high temperature to boil water in a pressurized steam generator. The steam then has “power” like it does in a steam locomotive, and the power is used to spin an electrical generator.

In this process, much of the ‘raw’ energy in the coal is lost in order to produce a much smaller quantity of ‘refined’ energy called electricity, which then can be stepped down further through DC to run the delicate circuits in a computer.

You could never run those circuits with a pile of red-hot coal, but then again, a pile of red-hot coal in a cast iron stove would be much more efficient for heating your home than an electric space heater.

And it does not make sense to use electricity to move a big car around. It is best to use a super-efficient internal combustion engine, a technology which has reached extremely high levels of refinement today.

America is facing an electricity crisis. Through our modern economy’s increasing dependence on electricity, we are going to need significant increases in our installed generating capacity, which currently is about 1.1 million megawatts.

But with Obama and his eco-profiteer cronies pushing electric cars, we would need to increase our generating capacity far beyond the expected big increases anticipated over the next 25 years. Yet even without a huge new load on the grid like electric cars, we still are going to have a hard time installing enough capacity because the eco-obstructionists are blocking the most efficient energy source ever devised by man – nuclear power.

Their solution is to install inefficient windmills one megawatt at a time. But to use windmills to fuel millions of new electric cars ain’t gonna work. Only big nuclear plants could, but that still would be inefficient. Because moving automobiles is, at its core, the “wrong use” for electricity.

You gotta love all those ads that show the electric car with no emissions coming from a tailpipe. Because the emissions occur “upstream” at the coal-fired generation plant’s smokestack.

The best way to save fuel is to not drive at all. Because there is an “efficiency paradox” at work that says that the more efficient that we make cars – or anything else, for that matter – the more energy we consume.

How?

Well, think of the opposite. If all cars got 2 miles to the gallon, we sure would not drive them much. But as they become more and more efficient, we drive them more and more and more, actually increasing overall energy consumption.

We need to start thinking realistically about the electric car: It is another stupid idea from the enviro left that does not work and that will harm our energy supply. That is why there are so few electric cars on the road – because they cannot compete in the marketplace.

So if you think that electric cars are all clean and green, think again. They are an extremely inefficient and wasteful way to move people around. Unless we all want to go short distances in golf carts.

Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.