A real analysis on this to see where all the trades and balances are would be a bitch and a half.

A lot of the excess CO2 and other pollution we generate is from our transportation sector. If we switched our power generation from natural gas and coal to more nuclear, solar, and wind, this transportation sector will still be a big problem.

But if transportation becomes more electrical, then we can get a much larger overall positive effect from central power moving to alternate sources. Electric vehicles can run from LOTS of sources. A gasoline car has to have an oil well at the other end. Well, there's biodiesel, but now we're getting complicated.

Add to that the fact that pollution control is easier on large, centralized systems than it is on automobiles and trucks.

--You lose power transmitting electricity from its source to the end user. However, it costs fuel to truck gasoline across the state, too. Where is the balance?

--Cars can be charged at night when there is usually a lot of surplus power available. Is there enough surplus now to allow for this?

--Efficiency? An electric car isn't using power when it idles (you can make this more complex by adding the air conditioning).

--Gasoline is one of the most effective ways to store a lot of energy in a small space.

--Recycling an empty gas tank is easier than recycling old batteries, but there is already a large infrastructure in place for recycling lead-acid batteries, and a large industry building up now for doing this with more advanced batteries.

Somebody is going to come up with a plug-in diesel hybrid. I'd love to see a pure hybrid show up, where the wheels are driven purely electrically, and an engine charges the batteries when needed (like a train locomotive). I wonder if turbine engines would finally be effective in such an application? A big SUV built like this could tow a semi-truck around and still get better mileage than a 1970 VW Beetle.

The "super car" would be a plug-in hybrid with enough battery power to run about thirty miles on no fuel. Its engine would be one of those that can burn ANY kind of diesel-type fuel.

There are a LOT of people working on this kind of thing in the car industry, and sooner or later somebody is going to come up with a real paradigm-buster, not just a hybrid that gets another five MPG.