The argument that battery-powered electric vehicles are not "perfectly green" is valid, however, it still compares very favorably to fossil-fuel-burners or even hydrogen-burners, and here's why:
Even if the electricity used to charge the batteries in a simple "plug in" car or plane is produced by burning coal, the emissions are much easier to control at the power plant (sequestering or scrubbing the CO2) than at the tailpipe of every vehicle out there.
I don't have the numbers handy, but I think despite pollution from the manufacture and use of batteries, that scenario compares favorably to what we have now, which has gotten better, but is still pretty nasty: smog, soot, acid rain, etc.
Also, each vehicle makes much more efficient use of the latent energy in the fossil fuel by running on electricity produced by same.
Do we all realize that gasoline yields only about 25% of its available energy in the typical internal combustion engine? Global warming aside, that's just stupid. It annoys my "inner engineer" to no end.
As for hydrogen, there's a reason why traditionally oil-friendly politicians and pundits have latched onto that as the favored "green" solution: because right now, the only cost-effective way to extract hydrogen (which is ridiculously abundant but generally bonded to some other atom) is to get it from fossil fuels (think "hydro-carbon"). Business as usual for those companies, with a few adjustments.
But it's great stuff- only emission at the tailpipe is heat and water vapor. Pretty cool, despite the challenge in making safe high-pressure containers for vehicles. Hydrogen-burning vehicles would be a good compromise that Big Oil, which has used its power to suppress green technology for decades, might accept as a compromise... however, it would be more sensible to burn the hydrogen to produce electricity for battery-powered vehicles. Safer, too... although a typical tank full of gasoline is like a bomb waiting to go off, whereas a hydrogen car's tank, if it ruptured, would probably vent very quickly without igniting, and if it did, the result would be a brief, if very hot, blowtorch effect. Hydrogen doesn't form a combustible-vapor fireball or lie on surfaces or the ground. Most of the fire and smoke seen in the Hindenburg footage was the skin burning; the big danger involved in the hydrogen burning wasn't the fire so much as the gas suddenly not being there, which kind of ends your flying for the day in a hydrogen airship.
Mind you, I think all of these strategies, working together, are worth using... if that's what it takes to wean us from the current methods.
I think the Electra's flight is an exciting milestone- I am surprised that such a flight took place so soon. The challenge to make the leap in battery, solar cell and motor technology reminds me of the challenge to produce a powerplant that would be light enough yet powerful enough to work for a heavier-than-air aircraft: one of the reasons the Wrights had to make their own was because all the "experts" believed it was not possible. ;)
People Eating Tasty Animals.
