Change? You can’t be serious
Let the excuses begin.
The New York Times leads off:
more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and
oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil
fuel.
The Washington Post weighs in:
Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like. "A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
said last week. "We need a business model based on cars of the future,
and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric
car."
But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision
for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part
of a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.
That's
because car manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce
hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.
Expect to hear more in the coming days and months. We will see a potentially debilitating alignment of old thinking and old, yet still politically powerful, economic interests. If it succeeds, the country will face much worse pain in the years ahead.
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