Why do american liberals think that they are saving the world by driving an electric car that is powered by th?

Because to the liberal mind they are using electricity and not gasoline. It does not come to their thinking that they have to burn coal to get that power.

Electricity can be made by tons of other ways that have nothing to do with fossil fuels.

And guess what. It already is. A solid 10% of our electricity comes from renewable sources and that number is rising and it can and hopefully will be 100% sometime soon.

It's about ten times easier to make an electric car 100% renewable than it is for a gas car.

Because big power stations are much more efficient than small combustion engines, and big power stations can get power from fuels that are cleaner than oil (like gas, uranium, wind, sun, waves, rivers, geothermal or wood and agricultural waste)

Some engineers took a look at using plug-in hybrid cars in Colorado within the Xcel energy power area. Plug-in hybrids charge the battery to drive a bit and then let the gas engine take over when the battery is run down. They found that in Colorado, using electricity to power cars cuts carbon dioxide pollution by more than half.

http://www.nrel.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/41410.pd...

It's a step in the right direction. Electric cars have the huge advantage of emissions-free driving and they have the potential to operate renewably, using energy from the sun or wind. We really need to be more conscious of atmospheric pollutants and resource depletion. It may be too late to repair the damage we have caused but we need to do what we can to reduce our impact if we want to have a prayer of our future generations being able to live on this planet.