The head of Toronto’s electricity and internet services provider reports that Toronto could not handle a serious increase in electric car ownership:

“If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails,” Anthony Haines told an audience at Ryerson University Wednesday. “It basically can’t handle that load.”

Plugging in a car battery to charge it up draws about triple the amount of power used by a typical home during the daytime, he said. Compounding the problem, most people will want to plug in their cars after work in the early evening, which is just when household demand for power hits its peak.

“You connect this huge load on the grid, and the grid simply won’t handle that type of load,” said Haines. “We need some innovative solutions.”

Clearly, shifting car-charging time into lower-use periods is among them, but someone has to figure out just how to go about it.

If this is the case in Canada, it’s got to be much worse in the United States.

Bottom line: The electrical infrastructure for widespread electric car ownership does not exist.

Under its state capitalist regime, China has certainly managed to capture a serious chunk of the world’s wealth.  Unfortunately for China and everybody else, thanks to the imperatives of the economic system its market-Stalinist overclass has adopted, it has also managed to build its way into the cars-first dead end.  Apparently, there has been a 9-day-long traffic jam in the Beijing suburbs this summer…

Under the brilliant leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley, in 2008, the City of Chicago leased the right to collect money from the city’s parking meters to Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Allianz Capital Partners.

Turns out that, during the life of their 75-year lease, these capitalists will collect at least $11.6 billion from Chicagoans, and, from that $11.6 billion, will likely net a profit of $9.58 billion before interest, taxes and depreciation. That profit will be more than 8 times the $1.15 billion Chicago received from the coalition of vultures.

As Bloomberg Business Week puts it:

The deal illustrates how Wall Street banks, recipients of more than $300 billion in taxpayer bailouts in the worst credit collapse since the Great Depression, are profiting from helping states and cities close record recession-induced deficits by selling bonds and leasing public properties.

With “help” like that, who needs harm?

General Motors now offers to sell you a partially electric-motored car for $41,000. Nissan will sell you an all-electric one for $32,780.

If you are among the few who could even think about forking over that much money for an automobile, here are four questions about what you’re buying:

1) Isn’t it ostrichware? As the smug owner of the Prius pictured at left shouts through his/her vanity plate, isn’t your main motivation for buying a Volt or a Leaf (and Big Brother must be laughing his ass off at that name for an automobile!) to make yourself feel that you’ve thereby done your part to help confront and reform the institutions that are imperiling humanity’s energy and ecological future? And isn’t that a rather pathetic conclusion to draw? Buying a 3,500-pound box of steel, plastic, and lithium is somehow a serious contribution to making a sustainable world? Really?

2) Are you sure it’s not vaporware? The outgoing CEO of GM once said he knew GM “had to have an electric car,” and, by that, he meant he knew it was an important gesture to show that General Motors is changing. No serious analyst of electric cars thinks they will comprise more than ten percent of the U.S. vehicle fleet in the foreseeable future. In fact, it isn’t at all proven that they even could, given their radical demands on our decrepit electricity-transmission infrastructure. So, have you asked yourself whether, by buying an electric car, you might actually be volunteering to serve as a useful rolling distraction on behalf of our corporate overlords, whose intent is to ride cars-first transportation for as long as they possibly can?

3) Where’s your theory of transition? It is inherently un-serious to presume that an individual purchase of any product — not to say a two-ton grocery-fetcher — equals a real contribution to getting humanity decently and humanely across the coming energy transition. No proponent of the electric car ever talks about this, for the excellent reason that cars-first transportation is simply not even imaginably sane, given what we’re up against.

4) Who will fix your crashed Volt or Leaf? What will happen when your battery pack sheers off your frame in a rear-ender? How much will you have to pay to insure against that event and others like it?

It’s mildly entertaining to watch the right wing in the United States lose the rest of what little was ever there in terms of its mind. Certainly, their ability to say the most ridiculous things and still obtain some news coverage goes far toward showing the continuing usefulness of Herman and Chomsky’s classic, Manufacturing Consent.

Dan Maes, the Republican-Wing-of-the-Business-Party’s candidate for Governor of Colorado, is apparently going around saying that pro-bicycle activism is not only an effort to — horror of horrors! — influence “the attitude” of our fellow citizens, but also “part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”

Yes, please!

Meanwhile, the perpetuation of cars-first transportation is, of course, held by Maes to be the very embodiment of personal freedom and, one supposes, a timeless and undiscussable requirement of democracy.

Ruling social classes age. After they get their boots squarely on enough necks, they begin to flatter themselves for it. Eventually, as memory of reality recedes, senility sets in, and they lose the capacity to do anything creative or flexible or realistic. Boondoggles become the only game in town.

The U.S. overclass entered into terminal dementia beginning in the late 1970s, and is now utterly braindead.

Consider this post from the editors of Investor’s Business Daily. In it, the IBD editors rightly disparage the Chevy Volt as a hopeless boondoggle.

But they also manage to say that the Volt is the product of “government stupidity,” rather than capitalists’ long-standing and utterly unchallenged dictatorship over transportation policy in the United States:

It wasn’t exactly Michael Dukakis riding in a tank wearing a Snoopy helmet, but it was close. President Obama, who reportedly hasn’t driven an inch himself since taking office, visited a GM plant in Hamtrack near Detroit on Friday to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off an assembly line. It was a perfect image, as the American economy is being driven off a cliff by this White House.

The administration, at taxpayers’ expense, has labored mightily and brought forth an Edsel that needs to be recharged. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, the Chevy Volt is a car designed by government. It is a perfect example of industrial policy run amok, of what happens when government picks winners and losers. Without heavy subsidies and government ownership, it never would have been built.

Aside from being absolutely false — the Volt was designed by GM, of course, the self-flattering blindness on display here is simply epic. Whatever one thinks of the cliche about camels being bad horses, the inarguable fact is that the automobile is capitalists’ idea of a horse, with all that implies about capitalists’ idea of energy efficiency and safety and sustainability in human mobility systems.

As this shows, our out-of-control moneyed overlords are so far gone on their own BS, they can’t even tell when they’re plainly tying their own nooses. The Chevy Volt is a sign of corporate capitalist dominance and desperation, as is market-worshipper Barack Obummer’s sponsorship and pimping of it.

If the public ever gains control of transportation policy, we will have to show these heedless murderers what government’s real idea of a horse is.

Forty-one thousand dollars. Time required to recharge the massive battery pack? Unless you are an early buyer who gets gifted one of the federal government’s $2,500+ home super-chargers (or buy one yourself): ten hours. Ten hours plugged in to move the thing “up to” 40 miles on electricity. That “up to” is there because using the stereo, lights, heater, or air conditioner — using the car, in other words — will reduce the all-electric range.

All this for a mere year’s worth of full-time exploited labor (more than that for women), or the price of three compact all-gasoline cars that get roughly the same gas mileage and make no huge new demands on the Earth’s limited supply of lithium.

Said it before: ROFLMFAO.

Apparently Eric Schlosser is now working on the important issue of the corporate capitalist food trade’s impact on food safety.

In this op-ed Schlosser relays a fact I’d missed until now:

China has become the largest exporter of food to the United States after Canada and Mexico. About 60 percent of the apple juice in America — like peanut butter, a product consumed largely by children — now comes from China.

From the perspective of energy-use, this is sheer insanity, stark proof of the point that what makes sense to capitalists is very often murderously short-sighted behavior that any functioning democracy would find a way to stop.

Deluded + Dangerous + Demagogue

Meanwhile, as to his skills as an analyst and predictor of how the United States works, I’m afraid old Amory gets a solid F.

Compare:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Of course, the secret to Lovins is that he’s always been trying to position himself to become a new-age tycoon.

In any event, when you hear this man’s name, you know you’re standing in a steaming heap.

At this point, any sane society would be moving very aggressively to build its way back out of cars-first transportation.  Part of that effort would be steep taxes on gas guzzlers.

In the United States, where we not only don’t begrudge people getting rich, we don’t even allow them to be questioned, what are we getting?

This:

DETROIT — It’s diet time for the once best-selling SUV in America.

The redesigned Ford Explorer has been slimmed down for 2011 and transferred to a car-based platform. And it no longer will be a gas-guzzling hulk with a V-8 under the hood.

Ford Motor Co. said today that the redesigned 2011 model — equipped with an optional, two-liter EcoBoost I4 engine — will achieve a 30 percent increase in fuel efficiency compared with the current V-6-equipped Explorer. EcoBoost has delivered similar fuel economy gains in other cars and trucks.

The current Explorer equipped with two-wheel drive and a four-liter V-6 is rated at 14 mpg city/20 highway. With a 30 percent increase in fuel economy, the EcoBoost-equipped Explorer should deliver 18/26.

Eighteen miles per gallon.

In the car-pushing trade, this is what’s called “hitting the mark”:

“We believe we’ve hit the mark with the next-generation Explorer,” Mark Fields, head of Ford’s Americas unit, said in statement. “It has the potential to change perceptions of what a modern SUV is all about.”

In honest language, this is the same old same old:  Capitalists selling the largest possible vehicles, the planet and its people be damned. “Hitting the mark” means figuring out how much waste you can get away with under new conditions.