Since I’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest over the last two weeks first by debunking the mythology that PHEVs and EVs will save their owners money and then by showing how PHEVs and EVs will sabotage America’s drive for energy independence, I figured I might as well go for the triple-crown of harsh realities by showing readers that in the U.S., where 70% of electricity comes from burning hydrocarbons, PHEVs and EVs won’t make a dent in CO2 emissions. They’ll just take distributed CO2 emissions off the roads and centralize them in coal and gas fired power plants.

I started to seriously question the policy arguments in favor of PHEVs and EVs when McKinsey Quarterly published an article titled “Profiting from the low-carbon economy” in early August. The article included a “Global carbon abatement cost curve” that shocked me because it showed that HEVs offered a substantial cash benefit from carbon abatement while PHEVs imposed a significant carbon abatement cost. A few days ago I got permission to reprint the original graph from a recent McKinsey & Company report titled “Pathways to a Low-Carbon Economy. Version 2 of the Global Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve,” 2009.”