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.

Remember when the Chevy Volt was going to have only an electric engine?

Turns out, the Volt is merely GM’s version of a hybrid, though the state-capitalist organization protests that entirely accurate label.  Accepting it would speak volumes both to the epic failures of General Motors and to the host of problems with the effort to preserve cars-first transportation by eventually converting vehicles to all-electric fueling.

The Volt will go “up to” 40 miles before its gas engine takes over, “though aggressive driving, along with extensive use of air conditioning, heat or headlights will lower that number.” Price?  $40,000.

ROFLMFAO.

Nothing, not even militarism, is more sacrosanct and off-limits to public scrutiny than public subsidy of cars-first transportation.  Even the slightest hint of rational, public-spirited, in-context criticism of governmental preference for automobiles is, quite simply, forbidden.

Check out this story and the video from which it arose.

Despite the entirely tame and conventional (though accurate) criticisms of this proposed new freeway in Mexico’s Jalisco state, Jalisco officials have managed to get it banned from YouTube, on grounds of copyright infringement!

This demonstrates the level of vigilance the babysitters of the system maintain on this central topic.  In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon event, you can be sure they aren’t lowering their guard, either.

Oilbama and what passes for a green movement talk breezily of “clean energy,” as if the only thing blocking a rapid and thorough transition to an alt-energy economy is oil-industry corruption and political indecision.

In the misleading verbiage of such false prophets, you never get any details.  Why not?  Because the facts are entirely contrary to the promises.

Leaving aside geology and EROEI, let’s examine the single point at which the fuel meets the car, shall we?

According to recent “good news,” “JFE Engineering claim[s] to have produced a quick charger which can replenish 50 percent of an EV’s battery level in just three minutes. The company also claims the system could recharge up to 70 percent in just five minutes.”

The news here is that this promises some relief from the fact that recharging an electric automobile is generally an overnight process, not a 5-minute pitstop.

The price of the speedy new charging unit?  $120,000 per unit.

As of 2007, there were 117,908 gas stations in the United States.

$120,000 x 117,908 = $14,148,960,000.

So, putting one single electric car charger at each filling station in the USA would cost 14.1 billion dollars.

Of course, the average automobile fueling depot needs and has probably 6-10 gasoline hoses springing off its meters.  This is for the obvious reason that motorists don’t want to wait half an hour to access a single hose.

So, re-fitting the nation’s gas stations for a fully electric fleet would actually cost more like $100 billion.

And, of course, we [read: the babysitters our overclass hires for us] love the free market and don’t begrudge gas station owners getting rich.  Gas stations, in other words, are not owned by the public.  So, this $100 billion expenditure would have to be done voluntarily by the nation’s fueling entrepreneurs, for whom such outlays represent deductions from their returns-on-investment.

And, of course, all this is merely the cost of the electron-dispensing units.  It says nothing about the radical reconstruction of the underlying electrical generation and distribution system that such a conversion would require.

Bottom line:  As the car capitalists know, electric cars are a minor diversion, a profitable trick on hoodwinked green shoppers and a crucial political psy-op against the general public.

The Facebook kids are planning an “Oil Out of the U.S.” rally near the White House on Labor Day Weekend.

The fuzzy little netroots kittens trying to organize the thing are citing this list of infantile, uninformed talking points parading as an essay by the thoroughly terrible Jon Powers.

Naivete and thoughtless promises aren’t going to dent this juggernaut, kiddies.  This is the beating heart of corporate capitalism, and a multi-trillion-dollar built environment we’re up against.  If you’re going to spout Democratic Party talking points, save the petroleum and cancel your childish, embarrassing demonstration.

Q: Why is the FICA tax a percentage, while federal, state, and local gasoline taxes are fixed, named numbers?

A: Corporate capitalism is addicted to cars-first transportation, and must therefore increase its public subsidy over time.

This is especially true in systemically normal times, during which the masses lose economic ground to the overclass.  In other words, keeping the Bubbas driving is more important than keeping them fed, clothed, sheltered, insured, or anything else.

As greens continue to stay home in droves and let Oilbama’s skin color cover his continual betrayals, some would-be rebels are demanding that Jimmy Carter’s gesture of installing solar panels on the White House roof be re-enacted.  Even the generally great Richard Heinberg is buying into this pathetically misplaced effort.

Underlying this silliness is the widely-repeated fiction that Jimmy Carter was somehow serious about altering the energy use of the United States.

In reality, Jimmy Carter has never understood the nature of the system he once babysat, and certainly never came within a country mile of trying to alter it.

Yes, his April 1977 “Address to the Nation on Energy” did contain a handful of honest observations about Peak Oil.  But Carter’s proposed responses were entirely inadequate and unserious.  Cars-first transportation, in Carter’s view, was just fine, so long as people reduced (by unspecified methods and degrees) the size of their vehicles.  And “economic growth must continue” was a “fundamental principle.”  In other words, Carter, as people knew at the time, was a pitiful and unpersuasive self-canceler.  His core argument was:  We face a dire crisis, and we must continue doing the things that are causing it. Talk about a loser!

Carter was equally deluded about energy itself.  In his self-pitying, proto-Reaganite, even more illogical July 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, he asserted that “the solution of our energy crisis” was lying in the ground right here at home.  “We have the natural resources. We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias. We have more coal than any nation on Earth. We have the world’s highest level of technology.”  So, one wonders why all those untapped Saudi Arabias had remained and still remain untapped.  The answer, of course, is that they absolutely did not and do not exist, at least not in any EROEI-positive sense, despite Carter’s tortured bullshit claims.

The truth is that Jimmy Carter was a true Democrat — a prevaricating poser with low self-awareness, whose first, second, and last commitments were to preserving the existing order of things, at whatever cost required.

It’s time for us greens to stop being tricked by Carters and Obamas and start building a serious movement for eco-social reconstruction.  The time for mere gestures is long gone.

And, by the way, green gesturers, roughly how much does it cost to “solarize” one’s house?  Last time I checked, even a small attempt would run somewhere in the ballpark of a whole year’s U.S. median income.  What percentage of the population is presently in any position a) to access, and b) to spend that kind of jack?