Chevrolet Volt: Photo courtesy of General Motors

Today I am proud to announce that my toaster gets over 230 miles per gallon (in the city). In fact, it gets well over that, having used absolutely no gas in several years of daily toasting of untold breads and pastries. Also, my computer gets shockingly good gas mileage, and my shoes, and my tomato plants. Even my dog gets incredible gas mileage, and she’s been dead for five years.

What? All these “facts” are absolutely nonsensical and irrelevant, because those things don’t run off of gasoline in the first place? Well, yeah, but then neither does the Chevy Volt in city driving. Yet all day today I’ve had to endure repeated news stories, on cable, radio, internet, and even broadcast TV news (which apparently still exists, who knew?) touting the claims that the Chevy Volt, the flagship of the new government-owned GM, may get an EPA mileage rating of 230 miles per gallon, city.

Well big whoop. The Chevy Volt is a plug-in hybrid, designed to go up to 40 miles off of the electricity from a full battery charge. Since most city driving trips are well under 40 miles (otherwise you would drive clean out of the city, wouldn’t you?), this means that, in most cases, the Chevy Volt will not use any gas at all on an urban trip, assuming you remembered to plug it in when you got home the night before all grumpy and in a hurry to get inside.

This lack of gas usage does not mean it will use no energy, however. Neither does it mean that the engine is some sort of thermodynamic breakthrough that has magically quadrupled the gas mileage of the Toyota Prius (which is a more honest number based on total energy consumption).

But that’s the way it’s being touted. Don’t get me wrong, I am not poo-pooing the idea of the plug-in hybrid. I like the idea immensely, since it brings increased competition to the transportation fuel market and gets us a step closer to a truly free and efficient energy market (yeah, some of us still believe in such currently unfashionable things) in which producers of entirely different sorts of energy can compete with one another to provide fuel without the need to fight the inertia of an existing fuel-specific infrastructure.

Plus, unlike nearly every other idea on energy supported by a popular culture movement, this one is actually feasible.

Once enough plug-in hybrids are in place, America can fuel a good deal of her driving with coal, natural gas, nuclear, or even hydropower (try that without a battery). As electrical producers switch from one fuel to another based on availability and price, consumers too will effectively switch between these fuels in their daily commutes. It’s a very economically attractive scenario that gets us closer to energy price stability, which unlike energy independence, actually matters.

But the hoopla surrounding the Volt is annoying because it is indicative of the role that the mainstream media has assigned itself regarding the highly political subjects of energy production and consumption. The media no longer sees itself as an arbiter of truth or a purveyor of information, but as a cheerleading booster of particular causes – typically the causes supported by the urban intelligentsia of the coasts. High on the list of fashionable political causes to be evangelized is the war against oil, which before an election always seems to become “foreign” oil. (After the election, petro-equality returns and domestic oil is bad-mouthed, too).

So we will have to endure such sad spectacles as the gob-smacked excitement over the Volt’s magic gas mileage. No doubt this sort of half-news will give heart and ammunition to the conspiracy theorists that have long claimed that the Big Auto makers have had a super fuel-efficient engine they suppressed as part of a plot with Big Oil. Funny, how no investigative report ever examines Big Media.

If fuel efficiency is the goal, the EPA needs to introduce an evaluation measure that accounts for total energy used, not just the liquid hydrocarbon component. But until the EPA’s rating system is made more complete in its accounting, I can still claim that my dog got incredible gas mileage – and she wasn’t even a hybrid.