The new (and improved?) adventures of Tintin

Posted on December 22, 2011 by SJ

Ten thousand thundering typhoons

Blistering barnacles! When I heard a couple of years ago that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would be making a feature film about Tintin, my initial reaction was a mix of eager anticipation and mild dread. Though I’m no Tintinologist, I’ve read and re-read all the books many times, beginning as a child but mostly with my oldest and especially my middle son in the last several years. We even have some in French and Hungarian. Would Spielberg’s involvement popularize an internationally-beloved series that very few Americans seemed to know or care about or would the Hollywood treatment cheapen Hergé’s magical tales?

I took my 11-old year, along with a friend of his who shares his love of all things Tintin, to see it at our local movie theater on opening night. Although it was the second showing of the day, we were the first ones in town to see it as nobody had shown up for the 5:00 screening (and there were only six people besides us when we saw it). Not a good sign, commercially-speaking at least.

After having seen the previews, I went in with fairly low expectations. The mixture of live shots and  animation looked weird and I could tell that the story mixed elements of three books: The Crab With the Golden Claws, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Secret of the Unicorn. Another thing that annoyed me about the preview was how it started: “From the two greatest storytellers of our time … Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson …” Uh, what about Hergé, guys?

Well, the film started out by addressing this issue head on with an homage to the artist, whom they portray drawing a caricature of Tintin in the Old Street Market. “I’ve drawn you before, haven’t I?” But the storyline was even more twisted than I had feared, turning marginal characters into bad guys for example and turning a bad guy into a marginal character, among other travesties.

But guess what – it works. It was really an excellent, gripping story for children and adults alike. Tintin, Captain Haddock, Snowy and Thomson & Thompson looked and sounded right. I’m not sure if it will be a financial success but, if it is, I wonder if it will spur many sales of the original books. After seeing the Hollywood version, will kids have patience for the wonderfully-drawn and cleverly-translated stories or will they just buy the X-box game and the action figures?

One can only hope. In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing it again soon and to the sequel.

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Greater fuels or greater fools? (part 2)

Posted on December 3, 2011 by SJ

So if your eyes didn’t glaze over reading about neutrinos, hydrinos and doofusinos in my last post, you may be wondering why I think promoters of revolutionary new energy sources may be bullshitters rather than liars. And what’s the difference anyway? It’s a seemingly minor but important distinction made by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who explained it in a brilliant essay “On Bullshit.”

A bullshitter “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false,” writes Frankfurt. “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Bob Park, who has spent decades debunking pseudoscience, has a slightly different take. He believes ideas like hydrinos and Orbo begin as false leads and are kept alive by pride.

“It always starts out as a mistake, but by the time the mistake comes up the person who started it has such an investment in ego that he can’t admit even to himself he’s been an idiot,” he says.

The would-be inventors certainly are bright enough to have made plenty of money in mainstream pursuits. More than money, Mills and McCarthy seem to crave validation. But I could be wrong. Not about their inventions being useless – I’d wager plenty of money on that – but about them not being like most of their predecessors. There’s a long history of frauds in free energy over many centuries so saying a modern-day developer is not a charlatan, much less believing that he may have something, is a triumph of hope over experience.

According to the Museum of Unworkable Devices, the earliest record of perpetual motion machines is nearly 1,000 years ago in India where the author Bhaskara described an overbalanced wheel containing mercury weights that could keep turning. Similar machines made their way, via the Islamic world, to Europe, where Leonardo da Vinci described several in his notebooks along with explanations of why they would not work.

“Go and take your place with the alchemists,” he intoned.

Despite scientific milestones such as the laws of thermodynamics in the 19th century, such ideas proliferated. A prominent example is John E.W. Keely, who raised the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars from some of America’s wealthiest people in the late 1800s by demonstrating an “etheric generator” that he claimed would be able to make all forms energy obsolete and send a steamship across the Atlantic with the power extracted from a gallon of water. Despite frustrating delays, he assuaged many of his supporters with impressive demonstrations over 26 years and even received limited endorsements from some prominent engineers and scientists, trying but failing to entice Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

Google “zero point energy” and you’ll find plenty of modern-day versions. And for all I know many of those people (though certainly not all) are sincere in their own way. But few of those have risen to the level of respectability of Blacklight. So how do they do it?

Blacklight refused to provide contacts for any of its big investors but I managed to track down one of the licensees (and also an investor – he won’t say how much but admits it was “a substantial amount of money”) real estate magnate Chip Akridge, who is still waiting to receive a prototype after signing a deal with Blacklight in 2009. He was introduced to Mills by a friend of his son who was working for the company and claims he was convinced by Randy Booker, a North Carolina physics professor, who he says told him that Mills had solved quantum mechanics (and, incidentally, received compensation from Blacklight). Akridge says that he doesn’t care if the theory is correct as long as the prototype works, of which he seems confident after seeing a demonstration in Blacklight’s lab. Another investor I spoke with some years ago for my original Wall Street Journal piece was the former head of energy banking at Morgan Stanley. He also based his confidence in Blacklight on “independent” validations by obscure academics, and probably also the fact that his CEO, the late Dick Fisher, was an early backer.

This is something Eric Krieg calls the “emperor’s new clothes syndrome.” Accomplished, important and educated men can’t admit that they don’t understand what they are being told or shown. In my own meeting with Mills, which happened at my office rather than in front of glowing orbs or bleeping machinery, I was forced to stop him several times and admit my ignorance of the scientific concepts he was rapidly spitting out to demonstrate his argument. But I’m a journalist, not a captain of industry, and am in the habit of of asking smart people dumb questions.

Is he definitely full of crap or is it possible that, like a once-obscure Swiss patent clerk, the scientific world just hasn’t grasped the profound work of a brilliant mind? Not according to people who have actually studied his theories – and, of the small number of people qualified to express an opinion, very few have done so. University of California astrophysicist Aaron Barth reviewed an older version of his book a decade ago and found numerous errors.

“It doesn’t even rise to the level of a legitimate physical theory that one might potentially test by experiment, since it’s not mathematically coherent or self-consistent,” he wrote in an article for The Skeptic.

So it seems unlikely that there is some sort of vast scientific conspiracy to suppress sources of limitless energy. In fact, given how commercially important it is (and also how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing), developers of new power sources too often get the benefit of the doubt from decision-makers. Claim you’ve cooked up a cure for cancer in your garden shed and you’ll be laughed off but say you invented a new fuel and someone might just take a flier on you. What makes Mills and McCarthy so interesting to me is that they have apparently tried so hard to gain some acceptance by the establishment. However, as MIT’s Aaronson points out in his doofusino satire, they didn’t exactly follow an orthodox path themselves:

After I’d conceived of the doofusino, I wrote to Dr. Hubert K. Pickleston, a senior scientist at one of the nation’s top research labs, to ask what I should do next. “Once you’ve developed your Earth-shatteringly brilliant scientific idea,” Dr. Pickleston responded, “step one is to patent the idea, to prevent others from stealing it. Step two is to call a press conference, to tout the revolutionary nature of the idea and its virtually-unimaginable range of commercial applications. Step three is to found a company around the idea, to which you should attract as many high-profile investors as possible. Only after you’ve completed these preliminary steps should you even consider submitting the idea to a journal for peer review.”

I can’t put it any better myself.

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Greater fuels or greater fools? (Part 1)

Posted on November 19, 2011 by SJ

Can you see the hydrino?

By now most of you have heard about some astounding new discoveries that may prove Einstein was wrong about a critical assumption – that nothing can exceed the speed of light. Whether or not further experiments corroborate the findings about neutrinos, the scientists making the claim probably aren’t the only ones excited about challenging such bedrock principles. Plenty of people have tried to violate the laws of physics for fun and profit.

Type “free energy” into Google and you’ll get over 10 million hits that range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Whether crackpots, conmen or outright fools, most developers of perpetual motion machines, revolutionary fuels and the like have found an audience with the uneducated and naïve. They have, with good cause, kept their distance from the world of science, expressing contempt for an elite they often cite as having ulterior motives to suppress their breakthroughs. About six years ago though, I met a man who tried to take the scientific establishment head on with a discovery he calls the “hydrino” that, he says, can allow a car travel 1,500 miles on a liter of water and make all other forms of energy obsolete. Hydrinos, he said, are a new and undiscovered form of hydrogen in which the electrons exist below the “ground state” in what one physicist describes incredulously as saying that you’ve gone “south of the South Pole.” Making a fantastic claim like that is easy enough but raising $70 million from a who’s who of the American military and business elite (senior executives of Morgan Stanley and Electronic Data Systems and the commander of U.S. air power in the Gulf War, to name a few) is another, which is why Randell Mills fascinates me (I wrote a short article about it in 2006 for The Wall Street Journal).

I recently discovered that Mills is still at it (he’s been doing this for 20 years) and tried in vain to speak with him or one of his representatives for a piece about scientific quackery that I pitched unsuccessfully this summer to another publication. While he may consider the recent findings about neutrinos to be in error, I have to imagine he is happy about anything that makes physicists squirm.

You see, “Dr.” Mills is not a physicist himself – he is an MD – but he studied physics independently and has written a 1,000 page tome immodestly called “The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics.” He’s been trying, with some limited success, to publish his work in prestigious, peer-reviewed academic journals. The scientific establishment, though, scoffs at Mills’s claim to have solved the theoretical anomalies that have flummoxed physicists for over a century and at Blacklight Power, the company that he founded nearly 20 years ago to commercialize his findings.

“It’s got nothing – it’s got no product. To say that it is silly is a gross understatement,” says physics professor Bob Park, author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud.

Park is one of the few scientists still willing to speak publicly about Blacklight after a flurry of criticism in the 1990s unleashed threats from Mills’s lawyers. Back then, Nobel laureate and current US energy secretary Steven Chu said he felt sorry for Blacklight investors while Michio Kaku, renowned for his co-discovery of string field theory, quipped in a Village Voice interview that Blacklight has proved at least one hypothesis: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

But Mills claims to have proof of excess energy in independent experiments. Credulous journalists have been all-too-ready to pick up on such fishy assertions. In an especially misleading piece on CNN.com from December titled “Harvard Tests Validate Hydrino Theory,” measurements done at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics by a Dr Alexander Bykanov are cited. But a quick query revealed that Bykanov, who appears to have no academic affiliation, never worked there and that Blacklight merely rented a spectroscope from the center. Blacklight refused to give details for the mysterious physicist. The article was posted on CNN iReport, a site for amateur journalists whose work is not vetted by CNN.

Blacklight inspired a hilarious and biting satire by Scott Aaronson, now a professor at MIT, who contended that his discovery of the doofusino would make hydrinos obsolete.

The recipe for creating a doofusino is simple. First pour two cups of chilled hydrinos into a greased pan, then add 3 to 4 tablespoons of polywater, a teaspoonful of magnetic monopoles, and a pinch of tachyons, dilute homeopathically until nothing remains, and finally stir thoroughly while chanting ‘Kumbaya’ and wishing very hard. Assuming that it’s an alternate Tuesday with Sagittarius rising and that you’ve been a good boy or girl this year, a doofusino will materialize and crawl out of the pan; you can recognize it by its fishy smell and its characteristic “duh-duh-duh” sound.

But if you are going to call a branch of science that underpins much of what we consider modern technology “a bunch of garbage,” as Mills does, then quantum physics, for its sheer weirdness, makes an inviting target. The great physicist Niels Bohr said that those who are not shocked by quantum theory when they first hear of it have not understood it while no less a genius than Einstein spent his final decades struggling to accept its conclusions.

Mills, who was forced to withdraw a patent for hydrinos, seems to relish the controversy. By accusing the physicists who mock him of being bound by dogma, much the way Copernicus was censored by the church, he turns the tables on the scientific establishment.

Taking a page out of the same book is Irish company Steorn, which took out an expensive color advertisement in The Economist in 2006 with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” It claimed to have developed a source of  “free, clean and constant energy,” inviting the world’s best scientists and engineers join a jury to validate their claims. Hundreds registered within days. With much fanfare, Steorn promised a public demonstration in London of its machine, called Orbo, in July 2007, but it never even started up. Following another failed demonstration, the jury finally released its verdict in 2009, finding no evidence that Orbo works. Unlike Mills, Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, was willing to speak with me.

“We took on the world of science and we got a bloody nose,” he says.

But did they? Investors have continued to support the company and they continue to sell licenses. Like Mills, McCarthy is clearly bright and apparently sincere, though also far more self-aware.

“This whole proposition sounds like a con – that’s a fact. Free energy for nothing.”

According to Eric Krieg, an electrical engineer and amateur skeptic who has spent 15 years tracking free energy claims and is a founder of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, the script is familiar.

“Sometimes the inventor gets himself into a corner by staging a fraudulent demonstration. Steorn is a classic case of that.”

Krieg has put up $10,000 of his own money to anyone who can prove him wrong. Though it’s a considerable sum for him personally, he considers the benefit he would gain as a member of a society with a limitless energy source to be greater. On a larger scale, magician James Randi’s foundation has for years offered a $1m prize for evidence of the paranormal or extra-scientific. Both Krieg and Randi made the offer to Blacklight. Asked why he did not go for what should be easy money, Mills claimed he did not want “strangers traipsing around his lab.”

Er, I don’t think that’s the reason. Does that mean I think Mills is a liar, a lunatic or a conman? No, no and no. Or at least probably not. Ditto for McCarthy – not that I would give either man a cent.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking: “Make up your mind already!”

Well, it’s not black and white. The explanation for why they keep going after so many years of failure and the reason that lots of rich, educated people have given them money is a lesson in the confluence of pseudoscience, psychology and “bullshit” (not the kind of bullshit you might be thinking of though).

Stay tuned for part two of this blog post where I’ll explain. Right now there’s a football game to watch.

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Publishers’ clearing house

Posted on September 12, 2011 by SJ

Going, going, gone! No, not the book publishing industry – not yet, anyway. I’m referring to the atmosphere yesterday when I visited the big Borders store at Columbus Circle, which is closing its doors in a couple of days. Unlike those perpetually “Going Out of Business” shops that lure in naive tourists around Midtown, this is the real deal as Borders is not just bankrupt but in liquidation and everything really must go. Getting rid of all that everything was a bit harder than planned though and tells you something about the public’s appetite for old-fashioned, printed on paper books. 

Even the displays and shelves were for sale. I saw quite a few people carting those off (including the Borders sign for some strange reason), but there was less interest in the remaining books, despite 80 and 90 percent markdowns across the board. Take this slow-moving item by “award-winning journalist” Loren C. Steffy called “Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit.”

I’m sure it was a fine book (I wasn’t tempted), but maybe it was because at least seven other books with equally clever and dramatic titles (A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea; A Sea in Flames; In Too Deep; Fire on the Horizon; In Deep Water; Blowout in the Gulf; and Black Tide) on the very same subject were all released within a few months of hers. Or maybe it was because publishers of non-fiction, except for shoddy instabooks, are painfully and inexplicably slow in getting them onto the shelves, as if we were still in the 19th century and received the news by sailing ship. Published just six months after the spill and two months after it was plugged, this one was actually pretty quick. 

Of course I don’t want to pick on Ms. Steffy. At least she got a publisher to buy her book, received at least a modest advance and now has something on her shelf to show her grandkids. Heck, for the original cover price she can buy five extra copies if she hurries down to Borders. Technically an “award-winning journalist” myself, I had much less luck with the gatekeepers of the printing presses when I made the rounds with my own idea, even though I chose a less crowded topic. A couple of publishers were interested but got cold feet. As one of them explained to me, before wishing me luck, his rejection “was due to the state of the publishing industry right now and the challenges associated with getting new books into the retail stores in sufficient quantities so that people know they are there.” He went on that “it is difficult to know what to publish except for books by people with major media recognition or books that will be ‘bought back’ by a company or interested party.”

In other words, they’re doing so badly that they don’t want to take risks. Call us if you’re already famous or would like to pay for the books yourself in case nobody else wants to. Oh, you could also see Jesus and publish the nation’s top non-fiction bestseller, Heaven is for Real, as told by a four year old who claims to have been there during an emergency appendectomy. Look it up yourself if you don’t believe me.

Another publisher who initially was interested in my proposal explained that if I could change my topic from a skeptical take on alternative energy to one telling people how to make a lot of money off of it then maybe we could talk. The “be on television” or “give us investment advice” meme is displayed by one of the first publisher’s bestselling authors, a TV personality who combines the two and wrote – I kid you not – Psych Yourself Rich. “Psych” is now unofficially a verb. A line from page one:

“Psych Yourself Rich is based on the principal (sic) that our financial lives – much like life in general -are powered and transformed by personal choices and behaviors, both of which are rooted in our values, perspectives, goals, and financial means.”

A writer on financial topics probably should know the difference between principal and principle. I know they both sound the same on TV, and the author is very telegenic, but still. It’s all a bit depressing for an aspiring author. At least I don’t have to suffer the humiliation of having my books collecting dust and heading for the recycling mill even at 90 percent off like this poor bimbo:

You betcha!

 

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Libamáj!

Posted on June 28, 2011 by SJ

Yummy yummy

When I was nine years old, my mom took me and my sister to Hungary, where she and my father grew up (we had been once before when I was three). Of course it was a long and expensive trip, not to mention much more complicated during the Cold War than it is today. That’s why I was very surprised to hear her say that the only reason she took us to Hungary was to eat libamáj.

This is a delicacy known to the world outside of Hungary by its French name, foie gras d’oie, literally “fatty liver of goose.” If you order foie gras in an American restaurant, or anywhere else for that matter, you’re likely to be served the still-good but far less delicate and exclusive foie gras de canard (duck), usually just called foie gras unless someone asks questions. I once had an argument on the Champs Elysées with an old friend when we sat down at a tourist-trap restaurant and were offered some as part of a prix-fixe menu and he insisted it was goose liver without the “d’oie” at the end. (It wasn’t).

Anyway, back to Hungary in 1978. Being a nine-year-old, I took my mom’s comment literally. Though Hungary is the world’s largest exporter of the stuff and our dollars, exchanged on the black market, made us feel like Rockefellers for the few weeks we were there, it was hard to find a restaurant that had any. Finally we did and the waiter promptly brought out this greyish, pinkish goop on a plate surrounded by congealed fat. I was stunned.

“You came to Hungary for THIS?!”

Now that I’m older and wiser, I’ve come to appreciate libamáj as a great delicacy. When I first moved to Hungary in 1993, money was tight but there was some sort of an EU ban on Hungarian poultry and consequently a libamáj glut. For the price of a Big Mac I gorged a couple of times a week on a gigantic slice that an American restaurant would charge you probably $40 for. Actually, strike that. They’d charge you that much for a piece a third as large. Later the price was a bit higher, but I was in charge of entertaining clients on a generous expense account and inevitably ordered my favorite meal, sometimes both as an appetizer and main course.

Nearly everything has a downside though. Foie gras has been attacked by animal rights activists due to the process of “gavage” or force-feeding that gives the delicious, fatty texture to the livers. The city of Chicago actually banned it, which led to protests by restaurateurs and the invention of “faux gras.” Several countries ban its production, but their gourmands gladly import it, mainly from number-one exporter Hungary. Of course these people happily eat veal and wear leather shoes, etc. Gavage was practiced at least as long ago as ancient Egypt and is now done more humanely. However a goose is fed though, it still gets cooked in the end. Animal husbandry ain’t pretty.

And then there are the health effects. A 200 gram serving has about 800 calories from fat and well over the daily allowance for cholesterol. With my waistline expanding while we lived in Hungary (it never stopped), my wife limited me to two goose livers a week. Since then I’ve eaten it very rarely – perhaps once every other year – which is why I had it five times in four days on my recent trip to Hungary.

My personal philospohy has always been that eating “healthy” food doesn’t make you live longer – it just makes your life seem longer.

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Bandi

Posted on June 19, 2011 by SJ

He's the one on the left

Tomorrow is my great uncle Bandi’s 100th birthday. When I mention to friends or neighbors that I’m traveling to Hungary to help him celebrate the occasion along with dozens of his friends and relatives the usual response I get is “Wow, you have good genes,” particularly when I tell them that he himself is traveling there for the party (he lives in Philadelphia now).

Yes, living to 100 and being able to enjoy it, much less be cognizant of it, are nothing to sneeze at, but they are far down on the list of things I admire about Bandi. Centenarians are, of course, rare. There are about 55,000 of them in the United States or about two-tenths of a percent of the population. It is rarer still to be a 100 year old man as the female-to-male ratio is 3.9 to 1 and probably even rarer to be in such good shape and able to live alone. (If you’re looking for health tips then avoid exercise, eat plenty of pastries and drink lots of Zabar’s coffee).

Bandi, who is the first cousin of my mother’s father Lászlo (who was murdered by the Nazis in Dachau), has led an impressive life. His educational opportunities limited by harsh anti-semitic laws in Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s, he started a family and his first child was born during the war. He was active in anti-fascist circles and was put into a forced labor detail building runways for the Luftwaffe. As he put it, no airplane was going to be able to land on the rutted clearings he helped build. One day a fellow prisoner, a pharmacist, offered him a pill to end his life. Bandi, who was and is a survivor and an optimist, refused and later escaped.

After the war Bandi was wise enough to see that nothing good would come from Soviet occupation so he headed to one of the few countries that was accepting immigrants at the time: Colombia. With no money or knowledge of Spanish, he worked in a textile factory and then as a traveling salesman before saving up to bring his family over. Through hard work and business acumen, he became the owner of a prosperous textile manufacturer. Over the years, as Colombia became unstable and violent, he and his three children from two marriages (the oldest is a year younger than my mom, the youngest a year younger than me) have wound up in different parts of the United States.

Bandi has been retired for nearly as long as I have been alive but he remains more active than most adults half his age. A lover of theater and opera, he has seen more performances than most anyone and made sure to arrive in Hungary early enough to see several shows before they closed for the summer. He speaks and reads several languages and is online constantly. When he tried to shut down his AOL service some years ago he was begged to stay with the company as he was the most active subscriber in Florida. I receive one or two emails from him weekly with interesting articles or videos and I forward my own columns to him (he actually reads them).

It is hard enough being middle-aged and remaining upbeat in a world full of tragedies. Having lived through two World Wars, the Holocaust and the Cold War and being old enough that not just the generations before him but his contemporaries and many of those decades younger than him are alive only in his memories, Bandi looks forward to the next day. I never hear him complain or even talk about himself much – he’d much rather discuss his children, grandchildren or extended friends and family spread over three continents. He is the glue that holds many of these people together and always seems to know either directly or through the grapevine where everyone is and what they are doing. In turn, it’s not hard to see why all these people stay in touch with Bandi: he’s a great guy – funny, wise, kind and erudite.

So, yes, I have good genes.

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Prius envy

Posted on June 16, 2011 by SJ

The ride of the rich and famous

If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous (and apocryphal) line that “the rich are different from you and me” were updated from Paris in the twenties to Hollywood today then Ernest Hemingway’s reply might have been” “Yes, they can afford to be green.” That was the premise of my column today about electric cars.

Forgetting that it is a Japanese import, Arianna Huffington called her Toyota Prius “an automotive two-fer, a pleasure to drive and patriotic to boot” while actor Will Ferrell said “there’s no reason all Americans shouldn’t be driving hybrid cars” and Meryl Streep opined that America would not be in the Middle East if everyone drove one. Perhaps the most honest of these A-List Prius-drivers was comedian Larry David, claiming he “needed something to make me feel smugly superior.”

But hybrids are sooooo 2007. With the arrival of electric vehicles (EVs) such as the $100,000 Tesla Roadster or the cheaper $41,000 Volt from General Motors, the likes of George Clooney, Matt Damon and Google’s Larry Page achieve zero tailpipe emissions while buying American.

Clearly going from being sort of green to really green comes at a significant bump in expense, even after generous tax credits that the rest of us poor schmucks have to pay. But – surprise, surprise – in a new study Boston Consulting Group has lowered its estimate for US electric vehicle penetration from 5 to 3 percent by 2020 despite high pump prices. Why?

More mundane technologies will appeal to those who are cheap rather than than chic. Generously assuming a 60 per cent drop in battery costs by 2020, BCG calculates that an EV’s price per percentage carbon dioxide reduction is twice as high as cutting-edge combustion technology and five times the gain from improved aerodynamics.

But it gets worse – or, if you want to stick it to that sanctimonious environmentalist neighbor of yours, better. It turns out that electric vehicles are not green at all. That electricity has to come from somewhere and burning coal or natural gas produces carbon dioxide too. Based on the US generation average, charging up that Chevy Volt battery will release about 27 pounds of CO2 on a typical 40 mile commute. Drive a Chevy Cruze – a car so similar in size and appearance that it is called “the Volt without the plug” – and you create just one pound more. You also spew less sulfur, mercury and other bad stuff, and you’re paying half as much even after the tax credit. Oh, and all those heavy metals in the Volt’s battery will have to be disposed-of somehow when it conks out in eight-to-ten years.

Don’t tell any of this to Matt Damon, Will Ferrell or Meryl Streep though. Those environmentally-conscious stars would never be caught dead driving a Chevy Cruze from their Malibu mansions to their private jets.

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