Hybrid Sales Plunged 33 Percent In 08

Wait a minute, gas hit and in some places exceeded $4 a gallon last summer, right? And everybody was proclaiming the end of the SUV and the commencement of the Age of Aquarius, I mean, of the Hybrid on America roads, too.

So why did hybrid market share dip from three percent of all sales to just two percent of the total? As ESPN's Chris Berman might say - Whaaaatttttt?

Henry Payne at NRO has details on what may well be the most counter-intuitive data trend of the year just past:

"For the year, hybrid sales as a percentage of the market sunk below 2 percent with sales of just 17,000 units — a significant decline from a high of 3 percent in the summer of 2007. That’s a long way from Barack Obama’s campaign promise that 'we will get one million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.'”

So, will the new chief executive and his top White House environmental advisor, former EPA director Carol Browner, dare to try forcing consumers to buy what Washington thinks they should buy? Or maybe they'll just do what the enviro-whackos have wanted to do all along - ban private autos entirely and make everybody herd onto mass transit cattle cars.

Those are the old reliable tactics of the folks Browner rubs elbows with at the Socialist International's Commission for a Sustainable World Society. Just makes you feel all warm and cuddly knowing how "sustainable" we'll all be, doesn't it?

Oh, you didn't know Browner was a member of SI? Go here and check it out. These are the people who really seriously believe that they know better than we do how each of us should live our individual lives. Which reminds me of something Ronald Reagan asked in 1981:

"If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"