Electric vehicles are coming this year, but will they be ready? | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Remember that GM managed to lease only about 800 EV-1s in the early 1990s before taking them back and crushing them.
...
Push play on that video and you’ll go through a kinetic round-the-car tour of the Nissan Leaf. But, in a sign of what Paine is talking about, that car is a static model. Nobody drove cars on the Leaf Zero Emission Tour. Does Nissan have finished Leafs? I haven’t driven one, though I have been around the block a few times in the pre-production “mules.” I could say the same about the Chevrolet Volt, the Coda sedan, and the U.S. version of the Think City (I have driven the Euro edition.) The Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid and the Chinese BYD E6, allegedly headed for America this year? I’ve sat in them. Fisker just switched battery suppliers (to A123) which makes you nervous that its new pack can be fully integrated in the rush to market.

These are the vanguard cars. They’re due to be on the road at the end of this year, and there’s only 10 months left to make sure the batteries work in the cold, the chargers charge, the subsidies (and public charging) is in place, and range meets expectations.

Big firms drop support for US climate bill | [Alarmist Suzanne Goldenberg] | guardian.co.uk

Opponents of climate change legislation said the departure of the big three companies had all but killed off Obama's last chances of pushing his agenda through Congress.

"Cap-and-trade legislation is dead in the US Congress and that global warming alarmism is collapsing rapidly," said Myron Ebell, director of global warming for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Hostage to US hot air | Isabel Hilton | Comment is free | The Guardian

In Delhi last week, ­Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the guru of ­sustainable development from Columbia University, delivered a sobering message about US climate ­politics. There was very little chance, he said, that the US would pass climate legislation this year, and almost no chance the Senate would ever adopt cap and trade, the system by which enterprises trade permits to emit within ever tighter limits. He himself, he added, was not sorry. He strongly preferred a carbon tax as a simpler and more effective mechanism.