Another happy democrat party constituent

The Daily Caller links the recent bedbug epidemic in New York City and other Eastern states, just like the Housing crash, to Clinton Administration policies.

While worst in the Northeast and especially New York City, blood-sucking bed bugs [family: Cimicidae] are making a remarkably rapid resurgence worldwide.

Though not known to spread disease, the itchy welts from their bites and the general distress caused by knowing one is being feasted on while asleep prove a nightmare for many victims.

Eradication can take months and cost thousands of dollars. There’s also the stigma — many high-end New York residences, for instance, keep their bed bug infestations secret to avoid embarrassment.

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

The debate isn’t over long-banned DDT, since modern bed bugs have developed a tolerance for that chemical. But in the pre-1996 regime, experts say, bed bugs were “collateral damage” from broader and more aggressive use of now-banned pesticides like Malathion and Propoxur.

Now some health officials are clamoring to bring those chemicals back to help solve the bed bug “emergency.” Meanwhile, EPA bureaucrats have downplayed the idea and environmentalists are pushing hard against the effort, citing safety concerns.

The issue has led to a standoff between Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, and EPA chief Lisa Jackson, who shot down Strickland’s appeals over the issue in a tersely worded letter in June. …

According to research at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, academic headquarters for studying the six-legged beast, some strains of bed bugs can survive, zombie-like, for up to 16 days after being directly sprayed with currently used pesticides.

If you consider that in most instances insects are intended to die shortly after coming into brief contact with pesticide residue, that’s pretty dramatic.

Meanwhile, tests at the University of Kentucky show the EPA-banned pesticides are still deadly effective at bed bug mass murder.

The London Times recently made its content subscription-only (instantly losing 90% of its readership), but Matt Ridley put up his own editorial here (unfortunately, in one of the ugliest blog formats I’ve ever seen), advising readers not to believe all of the media’s environmentalist gloom and doom.

[D]o not underestimate nature’s powers of recovery. After most big oil spills, scientists are pleasantly surprised by how quickly the oil disappears and the marine life reappears. This is true even in Alaska, where the sheltered waters, low temperatures and abundant wildlife conspired to make the slick damaging and persistent. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its website: `What scientists have found is that, despite the gloomy outlook in 1989, the intertidal habitats of Prince William Sound have proved to be surprisingly resilient.’ A scientist who led some of the research into the Exxon Valdez says that `Thoughts that this is going to kill the Gulf of Mexico are just wild overreactions’.

When the Braer went aground off Shetland in 1993 and spilled 85,000 tonnes of oil, storms quickly dispersed the oil, so the effect on most of the local wildlife was barely measurable. As one scientific report drily noted, after running through a list of undetected effects on birds, shore life and seabed creatures, `five otters were found dead in the oil spill area. However, three of these were killed by vehicles, one was recovered before the oil could have reached it and the cause of mortality of the fifth did not appear to be oil contamination.’ (One of the road kills was allegedly caused by a television crew’s car.)

This rapid recovery was also a signature of the last big Gulf rig spill, the Ixtoc 1 disaster off Mexico in 1979. Although the number of turtles took decades to recover, much of the rest of the wildlife bounced back fairly rapidly. `To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades’, Luis Soto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico told a newspaper this year. `But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again.’ The warm waters and strong sunshine of the Gulf of Mexico are highly conducive to the chemical decomposition of oil by `photo-oxidation’, and are stuffed full of organisms that actually like to eat the stuff – in moderation.

Indeed, the sea floor in the Gulf is rich in `cold seeps’ — communities of tube worms and other organisms that live off oil naturally seeping from beneath the seabed. (The annual flow of oil through such seeps is about half the total spill.) Hundreds of these clusters of clams and tube worms have been found since the 1980s in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, living off the microbes that eat the oil.

Such ecosystems are not equipped to cope with being inundated with so much oil even if it is their food, but one Texas scientist told the New York Times that `the gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil…it’s pre-adapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.’

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times wonders if the Dust Bowl, the Johnstown Flood, and even the Lakeview Gusher might not have been worse.

I’d be inclined to nominate the New Madrid Earthquake of 1812, but I think the inevitable winner would have to be the 19th century California Hydraulic Mining for gold that moved millions of tons of earth, silted up entire river systems, washed away entire mountains, and rearranged the topography of a gigantic area of land permanently.

In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.

It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,” said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.

The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.

The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.

That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.

Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?

“My take,” said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.”

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, debunks the Puritan meme of an addiction to petroleum.

The explosion of BP’s oil rig in the Gulf has been a calamity in so many ways, above all the loss of 11 human lives. With hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil gushing daily from the crippled wellhead, the environmental impacts have been excruciating. BP is responsible for a dreadful mess, one that will take years and many millions of dollars to clean up.

Awful as the catastrophe has been, however, life without oil would be far, far worse.

Americans consume oil not because they are “addicted’’ to it, but because it enriches their lives, making possible prosperity, comfort, and mobility that would have been all but unimaginable just a few generations ago. Almost by definition, an addiction is something one is healthier without. But oil-based energy improves human health and reduces poverty — it makes life longer, safer, and better. Addictions debase life. Oil improves and expands it.

“Oil may be the single most flexible substance ever discovered,’’ writes the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce in “Power Hungry,’’ a new book on the myths of “green’’ energy. “More than any other substance, oil helped to shrink the world. Indeed, thanks to its high energy density, oil is a nearly perfect fuel for use in all types of vehicles, from boats and planes to cars and motorcycles. Whether measured by weight or by volume, refined oil products provide more energy than practically any other commonly available substance, and they provide it in a form that’s easy to handle, relatively cheap, and relatively clean.’’ If oil didn’t exist, Bryce quips, we’d have to invent it.

Of course there are problems created by oil, as the Deepwater Horizon calamity so heartbreakingly demonstrates. But most things of great value come with downsides. There are 40,000 traffic fatalities in the United States each year, but no rational person suggests doing away with cars, trucks, and highways. Airplanes sometimes crash and boats sometimes sink, but air and sea travel are not derided as “addictions’’ we need to break. Deaths due to hospital infections, medication errors, or unnecessary surgery number in the scores of thousands annually, but who would recommend an end to medical care?

Someday there may be an energy source that is as abundant, efficient, clean, and economically viable as oil. But nothing today fits that bill — certainly not biofuels, wind farms, or solar power. Besides, it isn’t only energy products that we get from petroleum. Crude oil refining also makes possible plastics, synthetic fibers, lubricants, waxes, asphalt. “Other products made from petroleum,’’ notes the US Energy Information Administration, “include ink, crayons, bubble gum, dishwashing liquids, deodorant, eyeglasses, CDs and DVDs, tires, ammonia, [and] heart valves.’’

We are not “addicted” to oil. That is a metaphor based on the generally illusory notion of addiction, and it is wrong. We need petroleum or an equivalent source of energy to fuel our vehicles, heat and light our homes, and to operate our machines… to live. We also need food in pretty much the same way. Does it make sense to assert that we are addicted to food? We use petroleum because it is currently the cheapest fuel source. If there were not politicians backed by armed men with guns, at home and abroad, levying whopping extortion fees on any and all petroleum extracted from the ground, it would be really, really cheap.

The cost of the energy we use is not really a problem. We have so little difficulty affording it, that we let our own government attach huge taxes to every gallon we consume and we let primitives in far off lands squat on top of oil supplies and accumulate trillions by charging us for oil we discovered and extract for them. If the cost of petroleum really bothered anybody, we would insist on allowing oil drilling not only in the incredibly remote Arctic howling wilderness, but in everyone’s backyard. If the cost were a genuine problem, we’d have long ago sent the marines into a number of Middle Eastern countries and put all their rulers out of the oil business and back into the sheep herding/caravan ambushing business again.

What happens if PETA gets to write our fisheries regulations?

Probably not, but…

Last October, Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for the well-known tackle company Shimano, warned that President Obama was rapidly developing a fisheries policy report intended to serve as the basis for an executive order that would apply to both saltwater and freshwater fisheries and which would potentially have grave and very far reaching implications. People at Shimano were alarmed at observing the power of influence over the report of radical environmental groups and found themselves and the recreational angling community shut out.

Dave Pfeiffer, President of Shimano American Corporation explained, “In spite of extensive submissions from the recreational fishing community to the Task Force in person and in writing, they failed to include any mention of the over one million jobs or the 6o million anglers which may be affected by the new policies coast to coast. Input from the environmental groups who want to put us off the water was adopted into the report verbatim – the key points we submitted as an industry were ignored.”

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Robert Montgomery, a senior writer for BASS Publications, reported this week that the period for public input has now closed, and the situation has not changed.

The Obama administration has ended public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

Fishing industry insiders, who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force, had grown concerned that the public input would not be taken into account.

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big-game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. …

Led by NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling. As ESPN previously reported, WWF, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group and others produced a document entitled “Transition Green” (sic) shortly after Obama was elected in 2008.

What has happened since suggests that the task force has been in lockstep with that position paper, according to Morlock.

In late summer, just after the administration created the task force, these groups produced “Recommendations for the Adoption and Implementation of an Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes National Policy.” This document makes repeated references to “overfishing,” but doesn’t reference recreational angling, its importance, and its benefits, both to participants and the resource.

Additionally, some of these same organizations have revealed their anti-fishing bias with their attempts to ban tackle containing lead in the United States and Canada.

Also, recreational angling and commercial fishing have been lumped together as harmful to the resource, despite protests by the angling industry.

Morlock’s evidence of collusion — the green groups began clamoring for an Executive Order to implement the task force’s recommendations even before the public comment period ended in February. …

Morlock fears that “what we’re seeing coming at us is an attempted dismantling of the science-based fish and wildlife model that has served us so well. There’s no basis in science for the agendas of these groups who are trying to push the public out of being able to fish and recreate.

“Conflicts (user) are overstated and problems are manufactured. It’s all just an excuse to put us off the water.”

I looked at the National Resources Defense Council Transition to Green document. It certainly contained plenty of environmental empire building and a very lengthy list of funding requests, but I did not see any specific plan to ban sport fishing.

I think anything that radical is still a long way off in the United States, even for the Obama Administration. But a ban on angling, following the Hunt Ban, is definitely on the table in Britain.

PETA has a front group specifically targeting both commercial and recreational fishing.

The folks at Shimano were quite right though in recognizing that the development of federal land and water management policies hand in glove with radical environmentalist and strongly anti-field sports organizations is extremely dangerous to the interests of sport. Changing the basis of wildlife management from a focus on recreational use and harvest to a junk science-laden ultra-preservationist agenda would have terrible practical effects and there are a thousand ways that minor regulations can be crafted on the basis of one pretext or another to cripple little by little anything the left is not able immediately to openly ban.

Signing Keep America Fishing’s petition is not a bad idea.

Reason TV: Light Bulbs vs. the Nanny State
2:07 video

Hat tip to Roger Kimball via Karen L. Myers.

Japanese sink $1.5 million Sea Shepherd boat engaged in harassing a Japanese whaling ship in Antarctic waters. That’s really too bad.

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Ta- Nehisi Coates, in A Bad Time For the Empire, is philosophical about impending democrat party congressional losses resulting from ramming socialism down America’s throat.

If you work for the DNC or RNC, or if you cover politics for the media, elections are the end. The conversation of policy isn’t even really about policy, so much as it’s about how policy will effect the next election. But for others of us, policy is the end. Winning elections is nice, but you don’t elect candidates so that they can stand in front the capitol and look pretty, anymore than you send soldiers to the field for a photo-op. They’re there to do a job. And sometimes the job costs.

At least he identifies just which side he’s on. The Health Care Bill’s resemblance to other famous legislation has been remarked upon before.

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New Codes from Obama’s TSA:

From Vanderleun.

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Obama promises open Health Care Bill negotiations televised on C-Span 8 times.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to discuss the president’s promises.

photo:REUTERS/Christian Charisius

World looters gathered in Copenhagen to arrange greater taxes on the productive economies of the West and wealth transfers to Third World dictatorships. The politics of the participants could be discerned by the ovation accorded Hugo Chavez, and the entire pretext for the conference was belied by winter storms in Denmark and North America.

Gerald Warner heaps derision higher than the general snow.

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing. …

This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

People in the Middle Ages were so dumb they inflicted pointless suffering on themseves

Dies Irae 7:41 video

As the New York Times so convincingly demonstrates, the most dangerous hazard mankind faces is human stupidity.

If negotiators reach an accord at the climate talks in Copenhagen it will entail profound shifts in energy production, dislocations in how and where people live, sweeping changes in agriculture and forestry and the creation of complex new markets in global warming pollution credits.

So what is all this going to cost?

The short answer is trillions of dollars over the next few decades. It is a significant sum but a relatively small fraction of the world’s total economic output. In energy infrastructure alone, the transformational ambitions that delegates to the United Nations climate change conference are expected to set in the coming days will cost more than $10 trillion in additional investment from 2010 to 2030, according to a new estimate from the International Energy Agency.

As scary as that number sounds, the agency said that the costs would ramp up relatively slowly and be largely offset by economic benefits in new jobs, improved lives, more secure energy supplies and a reduced danger of climate catastrophe. Most of the investment will come from private rather than public funds, the agency contends.

“People often ask about the costs,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management, who tracks climate policy for the bank. “But the figures people tend to cite don’t take into account conservation and efficiency measures that are easily available. And they don’t look at the cost of inaction, which is the extinction of the human race. Period.

Soon to be declared a hazard by the EPA

If democrats succeed in nationalizing health care, Barack Obama’s leftward offensive will certainly have reached its high watermark. it is unlikely that members of Congress worried about re-election will risk defying public opinion a second time in order to enact Cap and Trade.

But Obama has a way around the legislative roadblock. He intends, it has already been disclosed, to have the Environmental Protection Agency adopt the perspective of the craziest environmentalist extremists out there and declare the emissions of all living animals, the gaseous elements of the carbon cycle of organic life, “a danger to the environment and the health of Americans.”

It would be a lot more dangerous, of course, if there were no carbon dioxide. Then, plants could not apply solar energy to it during photosynthesis to release oxygen for us to breathe and produce sugars and starches to serve as the nutritional basis of all vegetable and animal life.

Government prospers by regulating and punishing, by charging fees and leveling fines and by trading regulatory exemption for political support. You have to give the liberals credit for taking their penchant for statism to its logical limit. Once the fundamental processes underlying organic life are declared a menace, government has been given the ultimate blank check, a pretext to regulate, assess, and ban whatever form of productive activity it pleases. All the state has to do is identify a relationship between any intended victim’s economic activity and compounds fundamental to organic life, and its representatives can begin writing up the violation. If you’re living, you’re guilty.

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Wonderful as this is for expanding the reach of political power, as Iain Murray observes, there is always a crazy enviro group out there ready to go to court and some ultraliberal judge ready to rule in its favor forcing govenment to act contrary to its own (and everyone else’s) interest.

The Clean Air Act is potentially a lot more dangerous to the United States than any toxic emissions.

The EPA is about to announce that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, something that has in many ways been inevitable since the boneheaded SCOTUS ruling in Mass. vs EPA (which essentially found that the Clean Air Act was always intended to be Kyoto-on-steroids.) With thanks to my colleague Will Yeatman, here’s a brief summary of what this means, and why you should be appalled.

Under the Clean Air Act, an “endangerment” finding means that the EPA will have to grant a waiver to those states (such as California) that want to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles. The EPA has already agreed to do so. When “pollutants” that “endanger” human health and welfare are regulated, the EPA must expand its regulatory program to include “stationary” sources. The EPA has already announced that it will do so.

This is where Obama wants to get off the “endangerment” train, with the ability to regulate stationary and mobile sources (i.e., industry and cars) with almost complete discretion. These “endangerment” powers give the president tremendous leverage in a number of complex negotiations.

For example, the Obama administration already has told Congress that it will regulate greenhouse gases unless lawmakers deliver a cap-and-trade bill to his desk. The “endangerment” prerogatives also are the president’s bargaining chip in Copenhagen, where he plans on scoring his first diplomatic victory since his election night.

The problem is that the president can’t get off the train where he wants. He simply can’t stop what he has started. Under the statutory language of the Clean Air Act, the regulation of mobile sources tripwires regulations for all stationary sources that emit more than 250 tons of a designated pollutant. For greenhouse gases, that’s pretty much everything larger than a Gore-sized mansion. These stationary sources would have to get a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit for any significant modification, as would any new source. They would also have to get operating permits. The upshot is that millions of buildings would be subject to regulations. Small businesses will similarly be affected, as millions of businesses emit that amount of greenhouse gases. Fast-food franchises, apartment blocks, hospitals — you name it — will find themselves subject to EPA bureaucracy.

To get around this, Obama’s EPA proposed a “tailoring rule” that would change the language of the CAA so that the threshold would be 25,000 tons. The legality of this is very much in doubt, as it amounts to the executive branch legislating, and is therefore a violation of the separation of powers. …

Taken to the extent mandated under the Clean Air Act, the EPA would probably have to order the shut-down of most industrial suppliers and users of conventional energy.

There’s only one remedy for this otherwise inevitable regulatory nightmare. The Congress must pass H. R. 391, legislation offered by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) that prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.

Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for giving mankind scientific advice about the earth’s climate, but how good a scientific authority is he really?

Here he is a few days ago talking with Conan O’Brian about geothermal energy.

1:24 video

Quote the Goracle:

“two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees”

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John Derbyshire (who majored in mathematics at University College, London) corrects the Nobel laureate.

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that’s a mile and a quarter if you’re not as science-y as Al) you’ll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth’s core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it’s much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was “several million degrees,” we’d be a star.

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Of course, there is no real reason for surprise. The Washington Post once looked up Albert Gore’s Harvard record, and reported:

For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT (730). As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A’s to C’s as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.

When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil’s college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.

“Four eighty-eight! Terrible” Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president’s 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.

“Hmmmm. Chemistry. Five-nineteen. He didn’t do too well in chemistry.”

Audi of America President Johan de Nysschen made some indiscreet comments in a recent interview with Lawrence Ulrich that the media has been tsk tsk’ing over.

(Nysschen) dismissed (the Chevrolet Volt) plug-in hybrid as “a car for idiots,” saying that few consumers will be willing to pay $40,000 — the Volt’s estimated base price — for a car that competes against $25,000 sedans and conventional hybrids. Nor, he noted, is the Volt a luxury car whose green-technology costs will be excused because it also delivers prestige or performance.

“No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a (Toyota) Corolla,” he said. “So there are not enough idiots who will buy it.”

He did add that plug-in hybrids are good in concept and hold advantages over diesels in stop-and-go driving. But for the moment, de Nysschen noted, electric vehicles (EVs) are more about making a statement.

“They’re for the intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are,” he said.