Wednesday, February 23, 2011

More "Shocking" News

After last week's post on electric cars, I was looking at this one blog I've been following called Potential Energy, and it had a post about the money that the Obama administration has set aside for electric cars.

Obama wants to have one million "advanced technology vehicles" on the road by 2015, which includes hybrid vehicles as well as strictly electrical vehicles. To help achieve this number, the budget has allocated two billion dollars for factories to build batteries and other components for electric cars, as well as $300 million to make electric cars more appealing to the public and money to increase research and development for them. Rebates are also going to be offered for anyone that buys an electric car or hybrid for up to $7,500.

Do you think that this money is being budgeted appropriately? Is it worth appropriating this much money to electric vehicles?
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3 comments:

  1. Aaron AckermanFebruary 23, 2011 at 3:04 PM

    I think that this is a horrible idea. Why don't people understand that electric cars and hybrids also have an environmental impact. After all, nothing is ever free. Truth is, batteries require large amounts of rare Earth metals being mined, and the fact that they are by no means clean to process.

    Also, the grid is just not ready to handle powering our cars as well. We still have to burn coal to produce the electricity for the cars, and right now if too many people drove electric cars, we would not be able to produce enough power to power everything else.

    Not to mention that the electric and hybrid cars are harder on the road because they are much heavier and often have a smaller tire footprint.

    On the other hand, we are now producing gasoline motors that are getting better fuel economy than even the hybrid cars. We are just not ready to support so many hybrid and electric cars and we have a lot more potential with gasoline motors. Not saying that we should not be looking at other options, but I don't think we should let politics make a good thing fail when we are not ready for it.

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  2. Jen SchneiderFebruary 28, 2011 at 10:37 AM

    I think Aaron's words of caution are good. But on the other hand, we do have a significant problem with petroleum dependence and CO2 pollution, so we have to start somewhere. I'll be watching the outcome of this with interest. I doubt this will make it through given our current fiscal difficulties, anyway.

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  3. Dr. ChrysoberylMarch 2, 2011 at 10:49 AM

    Both comments above support very good points...but I think it is going to have to be a balance between hybrid cars and more efficient gas vehicles. We are going to need to use all technology present together to help with petroleum dependence and CO2 pollution.

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