The Chevy Volt’s Dying? What Took It So Long?

“There’s trouble on the horizon for the Chevrolet Volt, the electric wonder car,” USA Today reported. “Interest in buying the $39,995 plug-in car is starting to taper off, not only among ‘early adopters’ but among lots of other buyers, as well, reports CNW Marketing Research, which tracks such things.”

It’s not hard to see why it’s dying: There probably hasn’t been a less competitively-priced, oversold and underdelivering car for a target market in recent memory.

“The car is far too expensive and not practical for the lion’s share of drivers—not to mention the replacement cost for the battery when it goes. The high price tag makes it questionable that you’d ever recover the cost in savings,” writes sldl04 in the comments on the USA Today piece. Groingo is more pithy: “Volt just a FAT overpriced American built Prius.”

Australia May Make Additional Exclusions to Eligible CO2 Offsets

Credits from so-called HFC-23 gas projects have made up more than half of supply in the United Nations' main offset program, the world's largest. The EU has banned them for use in its cap-and-trade program starting May 2013.

[Warmist ex-anchorman] Don Shelby Talks Basketball, Haircuts and New Book - Oakdale, MN Patch

Shelby: Well I’m writing for MinnPost. I’ve written 29,000 words for MinnPost now on energy and the environment, and I hope someday to be able to write a serious non-fiction book, and I would like to think that I would examine whether journalism has failed to adequately tell the story of global climate change. I’m working very closely with a planet scientist right now, and the overwhelming scientific evidence is that there is a clear fingerprint for human-caused global warming but the population of the United States is about divided half and half on whether or not that’s true. Well how can science be 98% certain while the public is half-certain? Is that the failure of journalism or is that the power of the public relations agencies who are working for the fossil-fuel agencies, who are trying to stand in the way of any kind of serious change. So I’d like to do a serious examination, a journalistic examination, so not a book of stories but an actual investigative report on whether journalism is doing its job on this critical issue.