electric cars as the ultimate nimby refusal to deal with underlying issues

Coyote blog makes the best point about how people just don't get the issues involved with electric cars (I mean, aside from the fact that my commute and recharging would pretty much require me to stay overnight at my job every other day):

Press responses from Fisker Automotive highlight the problem here:  electric vehicle makers want to pretend that the electricity to charge the car comes from magic sparkle ponies sprinkling pixie dust rather than burning fossil fuels.  Take this quote, for example:

a Karma driver with a 40-mile commute who starts each day with a full battery charge will only need to visit the gas station about every 1,000 miles and would use just 9 gallons of gasoline per month.

This is true as far as it goes, but glosses over the fact that someone is still pouring fossil fuels into a tank somewhere to make that electricity.  This seems more a car to hide the fact that fossil fuels are being burned than one designed to actually reduce fossil fuel use. 

That part in bold, there's the rub.

All that drivers of electric cars are doing is essentially moving the consumption of fossil fuels out of sight (and therefore out of mind), while potentially increasing--that's right, increasing--overall fossil fuel consumption.

(How increasing?  Consider:  transforming one energy form into another always loses efficiency, and then you have to have to transported to the site for "on demand" consumption.  I keep looking for the studies that will show the impact of electric cars on our already overstressed urban and suburban electric grids.)

The cold equations (thank you, Tom Godwin, wherever you are) point out that moving X amount of weight (people plus assorted baggage) Y amount of miles (to work, etc.) at Z speed still requires exactly the same amount of energy it always did.

Not to worry:  most people are simply too scientifically illiterate to get that point.