"Green Companies & Jobs" = BULLSHIT Alert

That also = the American Taxpayer is about to be FLEECED.

Particularly in the vehicle arena.

I wrote on Saturday, October 22nd, about the LIE that was proffered by the Obama Administration -- or more specifically, from Vice President Joe Biden -- about an American electric car company:

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million dollar federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.

Read that again: "thousands of American manufacturing jobs" -- promised by Joe Biden, Demorat.

And again, just like the now-bankrupt Solyndra company, half a BILLION of our taxpayer dollars were purposely injected by the Obama Administration into a "green" company. Because "green," after all, is our future. It does nothing but sell itself!

In the case of Solyndra, however, it failed. The Obama Administration then adhered to the definition of insanity: it wanted to give ANOTHER half a BILLION dollars to Solyndra.

What is the definition of insanity? Oh, that's right: "doing the same thing over again and expecting different results (absent Psychology Today)."

In the case of Fisker, half a BILLION dollars were spent on an electric car company just so it could outsource the manufacturing to FINLAND. Goodbye to those "thousands" of PROMISED American jobs.

With that in mind, ∞ ≠ ø provided a link in the comments section of my Fisker post, bringing another aspect of their electric vehicle to light: its incredible INEFFICIENCY. From Forbes.com:

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).

Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place.

Warren Meyer continues to write:

As I calculated in my earlier Forbes article, one needs to multiply the EPA MPGe by .365 to get a number that truly compares fossil fuel use of an electric car with a traditional gasoline engine car on an apples to apples basis. In the case of the Fisker Karma, we get a true MPGe of 19. This makes it worse than even the city rating of a Ford Explorer SUV.

Congrats to the Fisker Karma, which now joins corn ethanol in the ranks of heavily subsidized supposedly green technologies that are actually worse for the environment than current solutions.

To summarize: the American Taxpayer was fleeced -- AGAIN -- to the tune of half a billion dollars so that:

1. American jobs can be shipped to Finland
- in order to produce
2. An electric car which is less efficient than an SUV

I'll go you one better: I have a 2008 Toyota Corolla LE which I purchased used in 2009 from CarMax.com and had shipped from Los Angeles because I liked the color and the interior. I could have purchased a new Corolla or a new Escalade or a new Porsche for that matter, but I didn't want a new Corolla or a new Escalade or a new Porsche. I wanted what I ordered. I limo-tinted the windows, applied custom sheepskin seat covers, and have the only 2008 LE on the planet with fog lights -- which you can only get on the Corolla S. Because I had them custom-installed by a Toyota body shop.

The new Corolla body change occurred in 2009. I didn't like the 2009, or the 2010 or 2011 Corollas (nor the new 2012 Corolla) because they're heavier, get worse gas mileage, and I still don't care for their interiors. My 2008 Corolla has gotten 44 mpg and averages 35 mpg. 44 mpg is PRIUS territory. And my 2008 Corolla doesn't rape the environment like a Prius.

To wit:

Prius vs Ford Expedition.

Prius vs Hummer.

Where do all those batteries come from? From where are those materials, ingredients, metals and resources mined? How are they collected? How are they packaged on-site? How are they shipped? Who mines those materials? How are they paid? Under what conditions must they work? What kind of breaks or wages are they afforded? Are the miners repressed? How many miles and over what transportation sources are those toxic materials shipped? How does the shipping affect the environment? Are the shipping procedures "green"? Through how many customs sites and borders must they pass? How costly is this? How far must these materials travel and over what kind of energy-inefficient conveyances?

All excellent questions that need to be asked regarding hybrid and/or electric vehicles utilizing huge battery packs. If you're not asking those questions, you're not truly "green."

And how, when sold or discarded, are the massive battery packs in hybrid vehicles like the Prius handled? How are they disposed? Where are they disposed? Who disposes them? Under what regulations are they disposed? Wet batteries? Dry batteries? Acid? Toxic materials?

You're an adult. You can figure it out.

BZ

P.S.
Not to mention how Emergency Responders, fire and police, have to factor hybrid or solely-electric vehicles into their action plans in terms of driver/passenger danger, environmental hazards, broken battery packs, acid leakage, widespread distributive factors of collision influence, length and breadth of affected scene, and HazMat issues.

I'll take the Hummer. Its simpler.