Free Republic

Green Politics: Golden State regulators have passed sweeping emission standards requiring one in seven new cars sold in the state in 2025 be an electric or other zero-emission vehicle. What can go wrong? Plenty, for if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that industrial policy and telling consumers what they need and must have vs. what they want and find useful doesn't work. Only the marketplace can accurately pick winners and losers. The government, having no competition, usually picks losers. We have also learned that climate change is an overhyped fantasy based on ideology rather than science. Yet the...

Two Troy women are charged with animal cruelty after Bennington, VT police say they had 77 cats living in two cars. Police think Regina Millard and Bertha Ryan may have been trying to find homes for the rescued strays by driving from shelter to shelter. Police say they learned of the situation after someone saw the pair sleeping in the cars with the cats. Bennington police allegedly found a dead cat in the trunk of one car, as well as plates of food and a litter box.

WASHINGTON — The first wave of mass-produced advanced batteries funded by the Obama administration's economic recovery program are starting to roll off assembly lines. So how will consumers respond? Despite the fanfare, the battery industry faces many hurdles. Costs are high. The government has estimated that a battery with a 100-mile range costs about $33,000, although stimulus money could bring that down to $10,000 by the end of 2015. The federal money has raised questions about whether the projects could create more capacity to build the electric batteries than will be met with demand for the vehicles in the future....

Conservation: The Chevy Volt is said to be able to get 230 miles per gallon. That's if it's continually plugged into a fragile and overburdened power grid. Where will you be when the lights go out? Since most U.S. electricity generation is not carbon-free, the Congressional Research Service agrees. The "widespread adoption of plug-in hybrid vehicles through 2030 may have only a small effect on, and might actually increase, carbon emissions," it observes. "If you are using coal-fired power plants and half the country's electricity comes from coal powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?"...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else. "If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

The Environmental Protection Agency took a major step toward tougher reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks Tuesday by giving California the green light to impose new requirements that could become the national model for combatting tailpipe pollution linked to global warming. The EPA granted California's long-standing request — denied by the Bush administration — for a waiver to allow it to pursue more stringent air pollution rules than required by the federal government. It cleared the way to implement immediately a 2002 state pollution law requiring new cars to increase their fuel economy 40 percent by 2016....

General Motors Corp. is expected to name turnaround executive Al Koch as its new chief restructuring officer to guide the auto maker's trip through Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Koch, a managing director at the advisory firm AlixPartners LLP, will be named to the post when GM files its bankruptcy papers at 8 a.m. Monday at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York's Southern District, these people said. He will be the highest-ranking outsider in GM's officer ranks and oversee about 60 Alix employees working for the auto maker.

Regulation: The Environmental Protection Agency ruled Friday that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be regulated. Many are willing to pay the economic costs. Will they be willing to pay in lost lives, too?There are a number of CO2 sources, mostly natural. But Washington can more easily — and eagerly — control human sources, which are roughly 3% of all carbon dioxide emissions. Unless Congress steps in with a legislative plan, unelected bureaucrats will have the authority to set caps on CO2 emissions on electric utilities, energy companies, airlines, cars, trucks, schools, hospitals — anything that releases carbon into...