Obama’s $5 Billion Gives Slow Jolt to Electrics: Cars

President Barack Obama has put $5 billion in taxpayer money behind his goal of having 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015. The Republican presidential ticket says it’s money wasted on “losers.”

Whether the technology itself is a loser or consumers are merely slow to adapt to new things, car buyers so far haven’t embraced electric vehicles in numbers close to Obama’s goal. Electric-vehicle sales since 2011 totaled fewer than 50,000 through September, just 5 percent of the president’s target.

“The reality is: that business model isn’t there yet,” said Brett Smith, co-director of manufacturing, engineering and technology at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “It isn’t there yet for volume. It isn’t there yet for reaching the mass consumer. And it probably isn’t going to be there for a while.”

Obama’s $5 billion invested in electric cars includes loans and grants to car and battery producers, spending on charging stations and $7,500 tax credits to car buyers. Recipients of loans and grants include Nissan Motor Co., which got a $1.4 billion loan to build the Leaf and its battery pack in the U.S,; Fisker Automotive Inc., which Ryan criticized in last week’s vice presidential debate for building its first model in Finland; Tesla Motors Corp. and A123 Systems Inc., the battery maker that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today.

Liberals’ green-energy contradictions "Al Gore is about 50 times richer than he was when he left the vice presidency in 2001. According to an Oct. 11 report by The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, Gore accumulated a Romneyesque $100 million partly through investing in alternative-energy firms subsidized by the Obama administration.

Two days after that story ran, Mitt Romney proclaimed at a rally in Ohio’s Appalachian coal country: “We have a lot of coal; we are going to use it. We are going to keep those jobs.” Thousands cheered.

The juxtaposition speaks volumes about the Democratic Party, and about modern liberalism generally. As the Democrats become more committed to, and defined by, a green agenda, and as they become dependent on money from high-tech venture capitalists and their lobbyists, it becomes harder to describe them as a party for the little guy — or liberalism as a philosophy of distributive justice..............."

Stimulus Cronyism "In preparation for tonight, Mr. Romney should read the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney’s Sunday column correcting Vice President Biden’s statement during last week’s debate that there was no waste, no inefficiency, and no cronyism in the 2009 stimulus bill. He gives the example of a leading Obama donor and subsidy recipient Elon Musk, whose company and the millions it received from the administration’s stimulus bill are under investigation by both the IRS and the federal inspector general. As Carney explains, it’s one thing for the government to mismanage a grant; it’s another when the mismanagement happens to benefit heavily some large administration’s donors:........"

Obama's Ersatz Space Program - Questionable Agenda "..............Of all the waste by the Federal government and with all the other Federal agencies that could be moved to privatization, Obama selects our space program.

This detracts from the progress of our missile technology that is shared with our military, it inhibits our national defense, and it damages our national identity.

Space X is Obama's choice for supplanting NASA. It appears Obama has picked another loser. Move over Solyndra.

Let's begin with the performance to date of the ersatz space program called Space X..............

Hamstringing our space program, cutting our defense budget, and entering into lopsided strategic arms treaties that seem to inhibit missile defenses is more than bothersome.

All appear grounded in some type of questionable agenda........."

http://www.redstate.com/aglanon/2011/10/20/donors-bundlers-and-obama-allies-secure-1-billion-in-loans-export-jobs-to-finland/

“........Tesla has even more questionable connections:

Tesla brings political pull, as well. A former Tesla board member, Steve Westly, is an Obama bundler who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the president in 2008 and for his 2012 re-election campaign. His Westly Group was also a financial supporter of Tesla Motors until Tesla went public in 2010, and Westly continues to back the company.

Tesla’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, is a hearty political contributor who has primarily backed Democrats, including Obama. According to published reports, another Tesla investor is Nick Pritzker, a donor to Obama and a cousin of Penny Pritzker, the national finance chair of Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Whether the technology itself is a loser or consumers are merely slow to adapt to new things, car buyers so far haven’t embraced electric vehicles in numbers close to Obama’s goal.

Sorry Obama and you Green losers but the laws of thermodynamics say that electric cars will always be inferior to internal combustion engine powered cars.

The laws of nature say that each conversion of energy will have inherent losses of energy to heat or light (some form of wasted energy).

In an internal combustion engines stored chemical energy is converted to heat through combustion and then to mechanical energy.

In electric cars chemical or nuclear energy is changed in to mechanical energy, then to electrical energy, then to stored chemical energy in a battery, then that stored chemical energy is changed to mechanical energy by the cars electric motors.

As can be seen in my simplified description of the processes of changes in energy required to make our preferred modes of transportation possible the electric car is at a distinct disadvantage in the number of changes in energy forms required to make the final rotation of mechanical parts to make the car move.

Even drastic improvements in battery technology can ever overcome the basic laws of thermodynamic losses.

Political meddling is the only thing that can make electric cars a success.

What good is a car that can only go so many miles before it needs to be recharged on a trip? And where are the recharging stations, how long does it take and add to your trip? And who is going to pay the bill for it. And the size of the cars make them rolling death traps vs any thing larger than them.

My 45 year old house is wired to the max now for all the ‘new’ conveniences we think we need. And I still lack enough plug ins for existing items. Which have to be kept in a cabinet and brought out to use on the small galley kitchen counter top. No way to enlarge the kitchen either...load bearing wall and a door in the wrong spot and money I am NOT spending to correct at our age and just 2 of us.

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