Charles Hong...

Strange fellow. I remember him getting all pet-lipped and lost-marbled about my scorn for the Kaohsiung World Games last year...

“But Fagan should accept the fact that the World Games raised Taiwan’s international profile.”

That was his response to my challenge that there were no clearly supporting facts for that claim! Fun and games... But he more often has bombastic letters published which lambast the Ma administration's latest publicized antics as selling out the democratic sovereignty of Taiwan's government. Yet today was weird. Today he was rabbiting on, apparently apropos of nothing, about electric cars for two thirds of his letter before switching to talk about Typhoons and carbon taxes for his last two paragraphs. A precis of his reasoning:

• Electric cars are not actually good for the environment since the electricity to power them comes from carbon belching coal fired power stations.
• Gasoline cars fitted with catalytic converters are therefore superior to electric cars in that they result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
• However, perhaps carbon dioxide doesn't create global warming, so...
• ... carbon taxes are wrong, which when combined with the realization that...
• ... U.S. dependency on OPEC oil helps to fund the Saudis gives the stunning result...
• ... that electric cars should be free to use electricity from carbon belching coal fired power stations!

Hilarious! Hong spectacularly overlooks the fact that U.S. oil reserves are themselves rather large (potentially 134 billion barrels, or about half that of Saudi Arabia) yet many of which lie untapped because carbon dioxide is acknowledged by governments and environmental lobbyists to cause global warming (even though the evidence for this proposition is dodgy). Let's get the act of mercy out of the way: Charles... if you ever read this... if carbon dioxide emissions do not create global warming, then there is no point to having electric cars at all!