On Green Energy
Every once in a while this guy Danny Westneat surprises me with a nice less-than-liberal insight into a problem, and this is one of those articles. It’s about Seattle’s big-spending activist mayor who bought a fleet of 14 Toyota Priuses and then spent $12k each on them to have them converted to “plug-in.” The program was advertised as being capable of producing 150+ mpg and the bumper stickers on the car even say they’re getting 100+. “It will use no more energy to drive a plug-in Prius for a year than your water heater does in 3 months.” is what they promised.
Except one problem: The don’t get any better mileage than my friend Keith’s Prius, which is 51 mpg. The program is a complete & utter failure. But hey, it wasn’t their money. It was yours, Seattleites.
The fact emerges that much of the green promise is not just hot air & hype, but is actually a cover for our government to spend huge money on pet projects that will not produce, while at the same time taking a bite out of our own freedom thru higher taxes, robbing from our children & grandchildren, and doing nothing to solve our nation’s energy problem because they are at the same time shunning traditional energy development that would actually free us from our foreign oil addiction.
Seattle’s plug-in hybrid program has said it all. Looked at it a certain way, we could be thankful that their half-million $ program has revealed these flaws–if we just use the results to avoid further mistakes but it would appear that WA DC is bound & determined to prove all of the same things using hundreds of billions of dollars.
By the way, Seattle has 330 Priuses. What happened to the days when governments would by inexpensive cars from Chevy and Ford for their fleets? 330 import cars instead of buying from Detroit…multiplied by thousands of US cities…is it any wonder that we’re now bailing out our auto industry? At least the Seattle police are still riding mostly Harley-Davidsons. They’ve tried BMW’s & Kawasaki’s and just keep coming back to the right answer, namely, Milwaukee motorcycles.
I love hybrid vehicles, I really do, they amaze me, I have friends who own them, I’ve driven them, and I wish I had one of the new Suburban/Tahoe hybrids (aside from the fact that you can’t any longer fit an 8’ board into them even though that was a feature of these SUV’s for the last 75 years which might partially explain GM’s problems).
But a lot of green programs are Trojan horses built so that the government can take greater control of our lives. Watch out for another Kyoto coming your way only this time your elected reps might just pull the trigger and crash our entire economy. It’s sad, because going green shouldn’t have to be an attack on our freedom.
Here’s the Danny Westneat Seattle Times link: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2008771363_danny22.html?syndication=rss
And here was the Seattle Prius Promise:
http://www.seattle.gov/mayor/newsdetail.asp?ID=8496&dept=40