Obama Calls on Federal Agencies to Move to Alternative Fuel Vehicles by 2015

Today, President Obama issued a memorandum that directed executive agencies to develop purchasing and deployment plans for replacing the entire federal vehicle fleet with alternative energy vehicles by 2015. This includes both hybrids and coal-powered electric plug-in vehicles.

The problem with such a gung-ho approach is that it ignores important facts, such as that the price premium for all-electric vehicles, and thus the fleet replacement costs faced by agencies, greatly outweighs the environmental benefits. See this 2009 GAO report on the topic. Basically, the Obama plan will drastically increase government vehicle costs in order to secure trivial environmental benefits. But as this administration has repeatedly demonstrated, pretending to be “green” while rewarding your friends and actually being “green” are entirely different things.