I had a similar conversation with an acquaintance a few years ago. She thought the electric cars would be just the thing to reduce the impact on the environment and help keep the air clean. Well, I started talking about electrical generation - coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear. Gee, where does the power for the outlet you plug that car into come from? Power plant? Don't power plants have emissions? Yes? How about the exploration, extraction and transportation for the fuel for the power plant? Is that free of environmental impacts? And, oh, by the way, isn't California getting a little bit short on electricity these days? Aren't we constantly urged to conserve?
Well, she was smart enough to understand my point. She sure got to thinking about it. She's at least a rational person.
Good discussion, but there are few misconceptions that keep getting toss out there. I am no Greenie, I am a mechanical engineer, but be sure to look at the issue in totality before waving it off as a nutty Greenie idea.
For example, like the one guy said, even like a coal-fire plant is around 35-40% effiecient. The best gas car is less than 20% efficient. Combined cycle power plants that used Natural gas, push 70% efficiency, because they use a gas turbine for the combusted NG (Brayton cycle), then they use the hot waste heat from that and heat a boiler which powers a Rankine cycle. The second cycle is basically "free", Pretty efficient, much better than a car burning fuel.
Secondly, look at the costs involved in fuel distribution vs. electic distribution. Fuel distribution uses trucks and locomotives which burn more fuel, to get the fuel to the gas stations. Pipelines use pumps which use electricity.
Electric distribution is static. No moving parts. There is some losses in the resistance of the powerlines and transformers, but that's about it.
Thirdly, emissions. Every emission control device you add to a car adds weight. Every pound you add to the car, reduces the car's overall efficiency. So you have to strike a balance between emmissions and efficiency. With a power plant you really don't, since the power plant doesn't move around. You can add tons of scrubbers, filters, and catalytic converters to a coal fire or other fossil fuel power plant and scrub the emissions very clean...much cleaner than a car's emissions. You can't do all of that to your car. Plus the fuel distribution that feeds the power plant can be done using mass transit like pipelines and locomotives, which is more efficient than many many more gasoline trucks running around. A single locomotive hauling 50 coal cars to a coal-fire plant from the coal mine is pretty efficient.
Plus such plants can burn old tires, waste oil, crude oil, bio-oils, and all kinds of other things you can't burn in your car...and still scrub the emissions clean.
Fourthly, power plants don't even have to burn fossil fuels. You have many other options such as geo-thermal, wind, and nuclear, depending on the environment. (You don't want to put a windmill farm on a beach in Hawaii, although they did, but the Big Island of Hawaii -does- have a geothermal plant that provides energy for the entire island utilizing the vulcanism of the island).
I massive vertical turbine windmill farm isn't going to mess up the aesthetic beauty of the badlands in North Dakota. Or go nuclear, etc. France is almost entirely nuclear power, with no problems. Power plants produce very little waste. The nasty stuff is produced from the production of plutonium for weapons, not uranium fuel rods. This frees up oil to be used for vehical fuel and airplane fuel (and I know of no way to power a plane with electricity and make it fly)
So, don't discount Electric vehicals just because the "neoLibs" keep touting them. With development, they can become much more viable, and even the tech right now can produce decent EV cars for commuters. Even if you only get 100 miles on a charge, how far is the average commute in urban and suburban areas? 5 miles? 10 miles? Obviously, they are pretty worthless for people who drive great distances on average. You do have replacement battery costs, but you have no oil changes, tune ups, warming up on a cold morning, no water pump, fuel pump, or oil pump to go bad. No overheading on a hot day, no radiators running over, no muffler to get a hole in it, no fuel to freeze, etc. etc. So keep that in mind when you look at the totality of them. Hybrids are nice, but you still have gasoline engines, and the maintenence of them.
But still, they are a nice option. Diesel-electric locomotives have been hybrid for many decades. Diesel engines are pretty efficient when they can run at a constant speed. Hence why semis belch black smoke from a stoplight, but not while they are humming down the higway. So on locomotives they run generators, which power an electric drive train.
Not to mention electic motors are constant torque (another bonus for the diesel-electric locomotive), which means you get the same torque at low speeds as you do high speeds, gas engines don't do that.