Charles Lane writes Washington Post editorials and also contributes columns under his own name. He already had a past as an electric-car skeptic when a year ago he published the op-ed 'Electric cars and liberals' refusal to accept science.' A September Post editorial reflected his views. This week he amplified them under the headline 'The electric car mistake.'
Lane's March 2012 op-ed charged that the 'electric vehicle flop' illuminates a point about the politics of science: Yes, one side can justly criticize the other concerning evolution denial, 'but progressives' fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy—limitations that themselves reflect stubborn scientific facts.'
He listed three such facts: the advantages of energy density, the inherent limitations of battery technology, and—scanting the grid's nuclear components—battery energy's fossil origin. 'Four decades after the 1973 oil crisis,' he wrote, '...any company that figured out how to build a practical mass-market electric car would be swimming in cash. That no one has done so suggests we are bumping up against the limits of nature, not just politics or economics.'
Lane's 'The electric car mistake' begins as follows:
The Obama administration's electric-car fantasy finally may have died on the road between Newark, Del., and Milford, Conn. The New York Times's John M. Broder reported Friday that the Tesla Model S electric car he was test-driving repeatedly ran out of juice, partly because cold weather reduces the battery's range by about 10 percent.
Broder's trip turned into a nightmare, including a stretch with the conked-out car riding the back of a flatbed truck.
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk fired back on Monday, tweeting that Broder's report is a 'fake' and that 'vehicle logs' show he 'didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour.'
The Times is standing by its story. My take is that even if Musk is 100 percent right and Broder is 100 percent wrong—which I doubt—Musk loses.
Who wants a $101,000 car that might die just because you feel like taking 'a long detour'?
Lane observes that although the Obama administration has invested about $5billion in various ways, in the past two years Americans have bought only 71000 plug-in hybrids or all-electric vehicles—only a third of what the Energy Department predicted. He calls the situation a 'debacle' and 'a case study in unchecked righteousness.' Energy secretary Steven Chu, Lane charges, 'epitomized the regnant blend of sanctimony and technocratic hubris.' He also quotes the first line of an American Physical Society (APS) write-up about a battery-research symposium: 'Despite their many potential advantages, all-electric vehicles will not replace the standard American family car in the foreseeable future.'
That Fred Schlachter write-up, however, reports on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) symposium 'Beyond Lithium Ion V: Symposium on Scalable Energy Storage' under the headline 'All-electric cars need battery breakthrough'— a headline showing slight variance with the quoted first line. And indeed, APS's Schlachter reports that symposium talks 'emphasized' that 'powering cars with electricity is a dream whose realization is drawing closer, if not yet close enough.' Schlachter writes,
The need for research on a new chemistry to develop high-density batteries was a theme of the symposium. Paul Alivisatos, Director of LBNL, and a Fellow of APS, summarized research needs: 'It remains true today, as in the past, that we need a fundamental understanding of the physics of how energy-conversion processes take place, at a much deeper level, in order to achieve a truly sustainable energy future.'
Lane's general omission of the prospects and possibilities from research also marked the Post's September editorial, which concluded in perfect agreement with the views of Lane, a member of the editorial board whether or not he actually wrote the editorial:
No matter how you slice it, the American taxpayer has gotten precious little for the administration's investment in battery-powered vehicles, in terms of permanent jobs or lower carbon dioxide emissions. There is no market, or not much of one, for vehicles that are less convenient and cost thousands of dollars more than similar-sized gas-powered alternatives—but do not save enough fuel to compensate. The basic theory of the Obama push for electric vehicles—if you build them, customers will come—was a myth. And an expensive one, at that.
Investments in applied-technology markets aren't investments in basic research. But consider the 8 February issue of Science, which contains the commentary 'Investing in distant rewards' by William Press, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Press never mentions battery technology, but he uses an intriguing statistical framing not common to science leaders' recurring pleas for basic research to argue that the general public not only understands but agrees. Charles Lane writes provocatively on many subjects. It would be interesting and maybe useful to see his reaction to Press.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
