Bill McKibben got himself arrested, wearing a suit and tie, at another one of his microscopic non-movement photo-ops.

The cause? A hopeless and technocratic gesture, as always. This time, it’s an effort to pre-empt construction of a pipeline to deliver Canadian tar sands extracts to Texas oil refineries.

Question for Billy Boy: What does one “win,” even if this project gets canceled? The same crude oil gets trucked to Texas? How is that a victory?

Of course, the whole affair has a strong odor of Democratic Party gamesmanship to it. Koch Industries, which funds the Tea Party farce, is apparently going to be a major contractor in the pipeline project.

And catch this, McKibben’s core statement of his cause:

So, we’ll be arrested outside the White House. But less in protest of the President, than in support of the Obama who ran for the White House in 2008, and who said the night he clinched the nomination that with his Presidency ‘the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.’ I’ll be wearing my Obama ’08 button when I go to jail tomorrow; we want to show him he has the support he needs to do the right thing, in the face of unrelenting pressure from the fossil fuel industry.

News flash: “The Obama who ran for the White House in 2008″ was the Advertising Age Marketer of the Year for that particular annum. In other words, Bill, you get taken, bought, sold, hoodwinked, eaten alive. One would think that three years and hundreds of betrayals later, you might begin to think and learn some rather obvious things. Apparently not, however.

With greens like these, who needs the Koch brothers?

As the evidence mounts that cars-first transportation is coming to a certain and potentially genocidal dead end, the corporate media is proving that no story, no matter how brainless, is too ridiculous to publish, so long as it implies the opposite of reality.

The latest example is this ROFLMFAO piece run by the shameless slimeballs at Yahoo.* According to its author, who quite plainly knows nothing whatsoever about energy or physics, a “tiny block of thorium could power your car forever.”

Yes, you heard it from Yahoo, folks: Onboard, thorium-fissioning nuclear plants are going to provide safe and endless energy for your car, starting “in 2014″! Never mind that, despite decades of trying, nobody yet knows how to safely and reliably manufacture electricity from thorium at any scale. Never mind that the vaporware to which the Yahoo journalism points is a naked scam.

When it comes to peddling distracting, sponsor-pleasing promises about the future of automotive fuel, literally any story will do. Except, of course, the truth.

*To comment on a Yahoo story, you must sign up for a Yahoo identity, a process that involves disclosing your date-of-birth.

How much lead would it take to build enough lead-acid batteries to enable construction of an all-wind-and-solar electrical grid to power the present energy use of the United States?

My new hero Tom Murphy reports:

Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 km (one mile) on a side. The size in itself is not a problem: we’d naturally break up the battery and distribute it around the country. This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 billion tons) of lead.

How much lead exists in the Earth? 1.5 billion tons, or less than a third of what would be needed to build that cubic-mile battery.

This crucial point ought to be of particular interest to those of us who see the special problem with cars-first transportation within the looming catastrophe we are (not) facing. Since, according to the recently de-funded U.S. Energy Information Administration, transportation currently accounts for 27 percent* of overall U.S. energy use, it follows that there isn’t even enough lead on Earth to allow humans to run the planet’s existing automotive fleet on wind-and-solar-only. Indeed, even if so-called “electric cars” are twice as energy-efficient as present automobiles, it would take half the Earth’s remaining lead supplies to make a battery infrastructure capable of meeting the power-storage needs of an all-electric fleet in just the United States.

This, of course, is merely the half of it, because the above is just the story on the electricity-generation side. It says nothing about what a fleet of 250 million “electric cars” would also mean for the Earth’s supply of lithium, the element that is the basis for on-board storage of the electricity that gets extracted elsewhere.

Let’s all repeat the DbC mantra: Cars-first transportation was a capitalist pipe-dream.

*The EIA treats production of automobiles and their fuels, roadways, and various peripheral goods and services as part of the manufacturing sector, so its estimate of transportation-induced energy use is a serious under-statement of actuality.

As part of their ongoing efforts to perpetuate cars-first transportation, car capitalists in the United States continue to spread the notion that there is or ever could be such a thing as an automobile that is a “zero emissions vehicle,” a.k.a. “ZEV.”

As the slightest thought reveals, this is a 100 percent deceptive claim. We know, for instance, that manufacturing the battery pack for a so-called electric car releases 3.8 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that is before the so-called electric auto has been driven an inch, i.e. before accounting for the emissions from the coal and nuclear power plants that make the electricity that drive the car’s motor.

Want a couple of yardsticks for assessing just how aggressively dishonest the “ZEV” label really is (and also just how puny checks on capitalist power are in the United States)?

In the UK, corporations are not allowed to run ads that state the “ZEV” claim.

The United States Department of Energy, meanwhile, is fully aware that serious analysis of the emissions impact of all automobiles requires well-to-wheels (WTW), not just tank-to-wheels (TTW), accounting. That’s because every car is a machine that not only gets driven, but also manufactured and fueled. So, the energy and emissions footprint of any and all cars involves both well-to-tank and tank-to-wheels sums. In mathematically form, WTW = WTT + TTW, and this is as elementary and inescapably true as 2 + 2 = 4.

It is the absolute height of dishonesty to lop off and suppress either half of this reality.

Nevertheless, the ZEV formula is 2 + 0 = 0.

It is also the depth of corrupt inaction to permit such dishonesty to rule the day. And of course, that is precisely, exactly what the supposedly public authorities of the United States are doing, despite knowing full well better. “[C]lose attention should be paid to WTT as well as TTW activities,” states the Argonne National Laboratory, to no effect whatsoever on public policy.

Now, there’s your true zero.

P.S.  As Billy Bragg once noted in a rather prescient song (“North Sea Bubble“) about Peak Oil, the Russians used to joke that, after the collapse of the USSR, the elites who had once told them that 2 + 2 = 10 were now arguing that 2 + 2 = 5.  In the USA, we’re no closer to 2 + 2 = 4 than any of that.  Indeed, our overclass’s minimizations of dangers might soon prove to be rather a bit worse than Soviet and Russian exaggerations.

In the first six months of 2011, in the United States, “Nissan sold 3,875 Leafs while GM sold 2,745 Volts.” Hence, if we suspend logic and accept that these figures are not exaggerations like virtually everything else claimed about these machines, there are now 6,620 Leafs and Volts among the 246,000,000 cars and trucks currently operating on U.S. roads.

So, to do the math: At this rate, it would take 186 years for so-called “electric” cars to reach the status of being one percent of the present U.S. automotive fleet.

Meanwhile, Nissan has just announced — wait for it — a $2,420 price increase on the cheapest version of next year’s Leaf.

Finally, this is not exactly the newest news, but check out this prediction of dangerous (and presumably catastrophically expensive) collision-induced intrusions into “EV” battery packs.

All this supports DbC’s thesis that the “electric car” is a mere placeholder promulgated to trick people, not excluding the hordes of phony greens who continue to swallow the bait, into giving corporate capitalists another decade or two to finish sucking all the wealth they can out of human history’s greatest infrastructural boondoggle, the cars-first transportation system of the United States.

Al Gore asks:

whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the sustainable well-being of the many. What hangs in the balance is the future of civilization as we know it.

A fine question — though, as always, one wonders where these mentions of sick democracy and oppressive wealth were when Gore had his chance to put them on the public agenda for real.

Gore, alas, remains personally incapable of mustering the kind of basic honesty he claims to advocate. Consider this howler, from the very same harangue in which he poses the above question:

New generations of biomass energy — ones that do not rely on food crops, unlike the mistaken strategy of making ethanol from corn — are extremely promising.

Pray tell, which generations are these, Mr. Gore? Un-named, of course. Because it’s a bald, shameless lie. Non-food-based biomass energy production not only remains vaporware, but has absolutely zero chance of ever coming close to replacing a substantial portion of present energy use.

Watching him rumble from one obvious self-contradiction to another, you have to wonder how Gore’s mind works. Civilization is in deep trouble, but a blend of minor policy tweaks and physically impossible vaporware will rescue us, if we’d only believe in them? Pathetic, just pathetic. Kind of like Gore’s whole career…

In America, questioning the reign of the automobile remains, despite the times and the laws of physics, as forbidden as ever. Instead of acknowledging that the idea of using 3,500-pound objects to accomplish our daily errands was as foolishly unrealistic as it was profitable to capitalists, we are now being lavishly trained by our dominant institutions to remain utterly ignorant of the pertinent realities of our dire energy-and-infrastructure situation.

The latest propaganda blast comes via today’s op-ed page at The New York Times, where a character named Seth Fletcher holds forth on the supposed virtues of “the electric car.” Though he hails from Popular Science magazine, Fletcher never mentions the basic physics of automobile transportation, which will always involve use of stupendously wasteful amounts of mass per unit of accomplished locomotion. Neither does Fletcher make a single reference to where all the new electricity to power 250 million “electric” cars is going to come from. Instead, as is the norm, Fletcher talks as if electricity is itself the original power source:

Electrification is not an all-or-nothing proposition — it’s a process, the gradual replacement of gas-burning engines with batteries and electric motors.

Fletcher, in fact, explicitly treats batteries as energy sources:

Today, at universities like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in national laboratories like Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley, scientists are developing technologies that could power a post-oil age — batteries nearly as rich in usable energy as gasoline.

Of course, no present or future battery will ever, on its own, be rich in usable energy. Batteries store energy made elsewhere.

And, predictably enough, guess how many times the words “coal” and “nuclear” appear in Fletcher’s op-ed? Yep: Zero.

Oh, and by the way, Fletcher also hugely fudges the data:

When cars like these are being driven on a large scale, the benefits will be substantial. The Electrification Coalition, an electric-vehicle advocacy group, estimates that if, by 2040, 75 percent of all miles driven in the United States are powered by electricity, oil consumption by light-duty vehicles will drop from the current level of nearly nine million barrels a day to two million.

Not only is that the rosiest of rosy assumptions, but note the key qualifier “light-duty vehicles.” According to the recently defunded U.S. Energy Information Administration, 40 percent of present petroleum use occurs via the operation of heavy-duty vehicles and pipelines. Fletcher doesn’t want to talk about that, because it destroys his fairy tale. (He also fails to explain how he imagines burning even that rosy 2 million barrels of oil a day in light-duty vehicles is a sustainable endeavor.)

As the headlining of junk analyses like this Fletcher piece shows, the powers-that-be in this society are going to take us all over the cliff, mentally and physically, if we don’t shake ourselves free from their heedless embrace. Contrary to assurances from obscurantists like Seth Fletcher, hugging the “electric” car is accepting, not rejecting, the path of death and destruction.

The political left has been awful at trying to make sense of so-called “consumer” issues. Not least among its failures has been an almost complete botch of the all-important topic of cars-first transportation. With exceedingly few exceptions, would-be car critics have swallowed and adopted the ruling “consensus” claim that the main driver of the reign of the automobile in the United States has been the nation’s “car culture,” rather than the power of corporate capitalists.

To the extent we have gotten anything else out of the left, it has been the Roger Rabbit conspiracy theory, which holds that General Motors, Firestone, and a handful of other corporations conspired to destroy light rail public transit in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. The basis of this story is the 1974 report of staff attorney Bradford Snell to the U.S. Congress. In his report, Snell retold the tale of how GM and its partners used the National City Lines bus corporation as a shell for acquiring and tearing out light rail lines across the country.

Today, Russell Mokhiber once again rehashes this tale over at CounterPunch, while also noting that Bradford Snell is nearing completion of a history of General Motors.

Mokhiber is upset that NPR recently ran a story mentioning the National City Lines legend and called it a “conspiracy theory.” To Mokhiber, that is a woeful understatement:

In fact, the destruction of the nation’s electric mass transit system was perhaps one of the most egregious – and underreported – corporate crimes of the century.

In saying this, Mokhiber not only maintains that there is something wrong with calling Snell’s story of a single cabal ruining urban rail transport a conspiracy theory, but also comes mighty close to lying about the outcome of the 1949 trial of National City Lines on which Snell centered his alt-famous report. Mokhiber quotes Snell on the issue of whether the NCL principals were convicted of conspiracy:

“It is not a theory,” Snell said. “These are not ‘unproven allegations of conspiracy.’ It has been settled judicial fact for more than half a century. Beyond a reasonable doubt, as affirmed by the federal courts, and after denial of further review by the Supreme Court of the United States, it is an established and incontrovertible fact that General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire conspired to replace electric transit in cities throughout America in order to effect a monopoly in the sale of buses and related products.”

But what Mokhiber and Snell do not mention is that conspiracy to monopolize “the sales of buses and related products” was the second and clearly peripheral charge considered by the Chicago jury that heard the NCL case. The main charge was conspiracy to destroy light rail systems. On that count, the jury acquitted all defendants.

I’m not mentioning this to imply that GM and its partners never maneuvered against rail transport. They and other car-related corporations and even the whole “business community” certainly did that, despite the jury’s verdict in that 1949 trial.

But it simply will not do to keep claiming that the Roger Rabbit story is anything like an adequate basis for understanding where cars-first transportation came from, and still comes from. It came and comes from the taproots of corporate capitalism, not from from some mere back-room deal, however interesting and important such deals have been. The problem we face is a lot bigger and deeper than some secret 60-year-old manipulation.

And, meanwhile, lying about the relevant facts is a damned slippery slope, too. Not only can the left ill afford to get caught with its hand in the cookie jar, but we just don’t have time for such games. We need to assemble and publicize the real, full story of how we got to our present, exceedingly perilous spot. In that effort, I certainly look forward to receiving some major help from Brad Snell’s forthcoming book on GM. But Snell’s wider theory of cars-first transportation is, despite its simplicity and cartoon ease, seriously misleading. Conspiracy theory is not enough. Our problems are deeply institutional and historical, not mere mis-reported (or not mis-reported) jury verdicts.

This is Chris Paine, the gent who made the movie claiming that Big Oil somehow strangled the “electric” (read: coal or nuclear) car.

Not surprisingly, Chris is now claiming victory for himself while shilling for the auto corporations with a new and even dumber movie designed to flatter (e.g., “Meet the Revengers: people who have taken REVENGE for the electric car by converting a gas car, building their own EV, installing charging stations, or otherwise doing their part to generate and promote electric vehicles”) navel-gazing liberals into sleeping through what remains of history.

Chris has never disclosed the slightest interest in connecting transportation with the laws of thermodynamics. If he had, perhaps he wouldn’t have been so thoroughly fooled by the basic physics and economics of supposedly “new” schemes for using 3,500-pound machines for everyday locomotion. As it is, he has moved from mere major crackpottery to that plus pimping.

And the operation known as “Mother Jones” is knee deep in peddling this amazing trash.

In closing, a sample of the depth and power of Paine’s thought:

In the course of filming Revenge of the Electric Car I became a little more sympathetic to the car industry in terms the way it impacts the global economy. Not just in Detroit in the obvious ways, but the workers in this industry all around the world. Also, lots of things that progressives like, like the show The West Wing, were largely supported by car advertising. This stuff went away when Detroit started to go under.

There has always been an envelope of magical thinking surrounding the automobile.  “Auto” means self.  “Mobile” means mover.  But no animal or machine is a self-mover.  To do their work, all require fuel from external sources.  Nevertheless, “automobile” is what we call cars.

Notwithstanding the rosy promises of capitalists, Presidents, and foxy greenwashers, the delusion doubles when we talk about the “electric” automobile.  Electricity, you see, does not come from nowhere.  Just like movement in animals and machines, its creation requires fuel combustion.  So, there is really no such thing as an electric car.

So, given current events, may I, ahem, pose a quick quiz question?

Q: What nation-state is presently home to the most nuclear power plants in the world?

Your answer.

The hard truth of the matter, as Gail Tverberg puts it:

Without nuclear electric power, electric cars seem very unlikely.

We would need more, rather than less, electric power to run electric vehicles. In the years ahead, it may not be all that easy to add electrical power of any kind. If areas were to lose nuclear electricity, they would be at a particular disadvantage.

Indeed, Gail doesn’t quite state this strongly enough.  The real truth is that, if we really think we’re going to be running 200 million “electric” cars, we will need not just nuclear power, but more nuclear power, meaning many more nuclear power plants than presently exist.

Funny, you don’t hear this very often, do you?