Originally Posted by
David Bierbaum
The problem with electric cars is that electricity isn't a fuel; it's a storage medium. This means your car is fueled by whatever fuels your power grid, which is most likely coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydroelectric power (in order of "green-ness," from low to high).
Of course, even bicycling fuel (food) isn't particularly green, with all the petrochemical costs involved in farming, processing, and transporting all this stuff...
And the human body is not nearly as efficient at converting fuel to work as our modern mechanical contrivances. If we are ever phased out of production by our robot overlords, it will doubtless be a far greener planet!
Electricity is a storage medium, and I would say that is its great benefit. We can make power lots of ways, some greener than others, but we can always run our stuff on electricity. This allows us to use power from lots of disparate sources, and we can develop those sources.
If you run your cars on gas, it's always going to be dirty. The costs, both to our economy and our environment, associated with producing and transporting oil are never going to be reduced.