Columnist: Plug-in cars are the new ethanol-style boondoggle

The amount of money that the U.S. federal government poured into corn ethanol is legendary. Today, we're left with a floundering ethanol economy and a few happy corn farmers but not an abundance of the biofuel powering the nation's cars. A columnist for the Washington Examiner thinks that we're headed down a similar path with plug-in vehicles. This time, though, "the feds may foster addiction to a fuel concentrated in a socialist-run South American country."

Those are the words of Timothy Carney, who writes that the government's rush to EVs is troubling because all those electric cars will need a bunch of lithium - some of which might come from Bolivia - to move them (Editorially, the controversial Examiner is right-learning, so the scary s-word in Carney's piece shouldn't be too surprising). Carney names some of the lithium lobbyists who worked hard in D.C. to promote plug-in vehicles to Congress. He writes that, "If the electric car lobby succeeds, brace for another harsh lesson in unintended consequences."

Carney also brings up the long tailpipe. While Carney is right that the GAO did warn against all of the coal that could be used to power the EVs of the future, he forgot to mention the GAO's finding that "Research we reviewed indicated that plug-ins could shift air pollutant emissions away from population centers even if there was no change in the fuel used to generate electricity."

[Source: Washington Examiner]