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Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

WSJ editorial board does not like the electric vehicle, emission and carbon tax credits, considering it crony capitalism http://www.wsj.com/articles/voters-should-be-mad-at-electric...

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It's just another one of the pile of vitriol against electric vehicles. Day after day, whenever someone mentions Tesla or Prius Plug-ins or the Nissan Leaf or whatever, it seems to kick in a auto-response of "what is the ROI of electric vehicles? You'll have to drive a million miles to get your investment back!" (as if buying a new non-exotic car is any kind of financial instrument). They also always talk about how many fossil fuels it takes to manufacture (or even charge) the electric vehicle, ignoring the fact that it not only takes the same amount to make the ICE car but it still has to run _directly_ on fossil fuels. When all of these arguments are refuted, the last argument is always about how cars sound better with gas engines and the rumble and other appeals to manliness or whatever rubbish.

There is a very large contingent that wants the status quo and either hires astroturfers outright to spread FUD, or influences opposition via media/ad buys. The rest opposed to electric are just old-school fuddy-duddies and the kids they've managed to influence. And, I've seen these arguments play out on everywhere from car specialist forums, YouTube comment sections on Teslas racing ICE cars, to right here on Hacker News when talking about electric cars.

I am not particularly opposed to their argument (crony capitalism is evil, after all) but their omission of decades of handouts to fossil-based businesses, as well as variety of present-day deductions crafted specifically for those industries makes the argument hypocritical or incomplete, to say the least.

Many of those "handouts" are legitimate tax breaks that all manufacturing companies receive, even Apple and Microsoft, only oil companies get capped at 6% on their section 199 [1] where everyone else gets 9%

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/04/25/the-surp...

And many of them are subtle but gigantic subsidies, like allowing them and their customers to poison the population without consequence, not even paying for the damages.

I'm not paid and I don't want the status quo, but until we shift electricity production away from coal, there is absolutely no reason to subsidize these cars.

The linked article never mentioned investment. It just highlights to utterly stupid one-size-fits-all legislation that cause automakers to produce cars they otherwise wouldn't produce. How about just raising the tax on gas if you want less gas produced???

In the US, coal power is under 40% of the total generation mix already, and dropping. My car emits less CO2 than a Prius, despite being way larger, heavier, and more powerful, and that will only get better as time goes on. It also emits zero local pollution, which is a pretty big deal.

How much longer do you want to wait? Electric is better now and just keeps improving. It takes a long time to change the makeup of the vehicle fleet (the average vehicle on US roads is over 11 years old) so if you wait until the grid is 100% squeaky clean before you start to make changes there, you'll have to wait much longer before you see benefits.

I do agree that it would be much better to just tax things to account for their externalities and let the market shake it out. But since that doesn't seem to happen much, we have to work with what we can get.

Well, yeah. You should tax the thing you're actually trying to reduce (carbon emissions), rather than subsidize a specific means of reducing one mode of producing that thing.

The former unleashes entrepreneurial ingenuity on all ways of economizing on the targeted resource; the latter plugs only one of many leaks, rewards the wrong thing, and is rightly called "crony capitalism".

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