As the Drudge Report today hails the coming of the fuel-efficient Smart car, it might be worth pointing out other ways in which people are adapting to deal with higher fuel prices. I don’t mean to minimize any of the pain associated with skyrocketing energy costs, whether personal (I feel it, too) or economy-wide, but it is interesting to observe the myriad and often unexpected effects of price changes. It’s the market working. Or, to put it another way, it’s the human mind working to adapt creatively to the challenge of scarce resources.

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As I said in 2006:

Without too much exaggeration, you could say that today’s electric cars are really coal-powered. If you look at the sources of electricity in the US, “coal provides over half of the electricity flowing into American homes.” That means that in one ideal world of the alternative fuel crowd, when you plug your car in, you’re plugging it in to a coal plant (this is also why the idea of consumer carbon credits is catching on). The energy and environmental issues in the world are about far more than “gas guzzling” SUVs.

Now from USAToday, “Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution.”

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Subsidize this!

Richard Burr has an excellent commentary in the Weekly Standard on the growing — and for some reasons puzzling — popularity of hybrid vehicles. Puzzling because these things don’t get the promised gains in fuel economy and don’t seem to work very well.

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