The government-sponsored shift to electric cars hasn’t had the best possible launch. Despite federal subsidies for purchases, and government arguments for electric as the green option of the future, buyers have — to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn — stayed away in droves. Chevy only sold 281 Volts in February, 601 in March, and 493 in April. For the year, Chevy has only sold 2,029 of its newest Volt model. The Nissan Leaf has fared even worse, selling only 1,044 for the same model year.

Those numbers may be artificially inflated as well. The National Legal and Policy Center reported last weekend that the "dismal" sales seem to include sales to the dealers themselves. The center's search on eBay produced a number of "used" Volts for sale with less than 100 miles on them. The inquiries took the center to dealerships that were selling the cars — minus the $7,500 federal subsidy, which the dealers themselves claimed as the original owners of the vehicles. One Chicago dealer offered a "used" Volt at the MSRP for a new vehicle, and advised the NLPC reporter posing as a buyer not to apply for the tax credit. . . .

If the vehicles had a long life span, they might still be a worthy investment. The batteries negate any such advantage. The life span of car batteries in electric vehicles will run as short as three years, possibly as long as eight years. At that point, consumers will have to buy replacements in order to keep the vehicle operational. For the Nissan Leaf, that will cost about $10,000, at least as predicted now. Car owners could rebuild their internal combustion engines four times over for that price.

Car owners facing that kind of bill will be more likely to buy a new car rather than spend that money on new batteries. Unfortunately for them, their existing electric cars will have almost no trade-in value, thanks to the battery problem. They’ll have to dump their cars and buy another without any real asset trade to take the sting out of the price, unless they want to get a loan for the new batteries on the old car. Owners of these vehicles will almost certainly have to make payments on them for the entire life of the vehicle.

That brings us to the problem of disposal. Where do we plan to put all of the dead batteries that will necessarily have to be discarded? Some (but not all) components can be recycled, and those elements which must be disposed are not terribly eco-friendly, depending on the kind of batteries. Lithium ion seems to be the direction most car manufacturers are heading, which poses fewer disposal risks to the environment than other batteries — but still poses risks in mining and manufacturing, especially to groundwater.

Lithium also poses another blow to the argument for the electric car — its domestic availability. Eighty-five percent of the known reserves are in Bolivia, Chile, and China, and lithium is not the only element needed for large-scale production of car battery systems. Large-flake graphite is also needed, and China controls 80 percent of the market, along with other "rare earth" elements. Far from ending our dependence on foreign resources, we will merely exchange our dependence from the Middle East to China, which is not exactly an encouraging thought for our future.

Even if we did have these elements in abundance, we would need to mine and drill for them. Those are precisely the activities that environmentalists and short-sighted government policies have been blocking for decades in coal, oil, shale, and natural gas. Besides, "peak lithium" may arrive long before "peak oil," as the Argonne National Laboratory estimates that we only have enough lithium available to manufacture car batteries through 2050 — less than 40 years from now. A lithium "crunch" could occur by 2017 — which also hardly lends confidence to the reliability of the electric car as a long-term solution.

Besides, where will we get the energy to charge all of these electric vehicles? Transferring millions of vehicles to the power grid will require massive new sources of electricity. The only technologies available to provide that kind of increase are coal and nuclear power. President Obama promised to "necessarily bankrupt" new coal-operated electrical plants during his presidential campaign, and while he has backed nuclear power, environmentalists still oppose it.

It turns out that consumers seem to be smarter than the government when it comes to picking winners and losers in the automobile market. They know a bad deal when they see one.

It was supposed to be the White House’s latest make-nice session with corporate America — a visit by Chief of Staff William M. Daley to a meeting with hundreds of manufacturing executives in town to press lawmakers for looser regulations.

But the outreach soon turned into a rare public dressing down of the president’s policies with his highest-ranking aide.

One by one, exasperated executives stood to air their grievances on environmental regulations and stalled free-trade deals. And Daley, the former banker tasked with building ties with industry, found himself looking for the right balance between empathy and defending his boss.

At one point, the room erupted in applause when Massachusetts utility executive Doug Starrett, his voice shaking with emotion, accused the administration of blocking construction on one of his facilities to protect fish, saying government “throws sand into the gears of progress.”

Daley said he did not have many good answers, appearing to throw up his hands in frustration at what he called “bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.”

“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,” he said.

The exchange suggests the limits of the elaborate courtship of corporations begun by President Obama and his top aides after Democrats’ big losses in the 2010 elections — an effort that has taken on new urgency in recent weeks.

Top aides have been reaching out to business leaders as Obama’s reelection campaign seeks to expand its network of potential new donors and fundraisers. And the White House has hoped that a closer alliance with businesses would help spur job growth.

Even as the White House pledges more receptivity to corporate concerns, business continues to spar with the administration on numerous fronts.

Wall Street is lobbying to undo many of the new regulations signed into law last year. Manufacturers say environmental policies are hindering growth. And, in a high-profile case that tests the administration’s allegiances, aerospace giant Boeing is warring with labor regulators over its decision to open a plant in South Carolina, which is hostile to unions.

In his speech and during a question-and-answer session Thursday, Daley laid out the administration’s efforts to help business, promoting Obama’s support for changing the corporate tax structure and for new free trade agreements.

He pointed to the administration’s effort, led by regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, to identify hundreds of rules that could be costing businesses money and time.

When a paper company executive said Environmental Protection Agency regulations might cost her $10 million to $15 million to upgrade a mill, Daley said the number of rules and regulations “that come out of agencies is overwhelming.”

The American people have rejected the EPA’s cap-and-trade regulations overwhelmingly, and this month, the House of Representatives passed the Energy Tax and Prevention Act that would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gasses (i.e., carbon dioxide). Of course, this caused the fear-mongerers to scream that we don’t care about the environment. What was left out of their talking points is that this legislation does not prohibit the EPA from regulating those hazardous pollutants that are harmful to public health. We await the Senate's action on this bill.

The Environmental Police Agency’s assault on our economy and state does not stop there. It wants to control what kind of light-bulbs Americans use, how much power the utility companies generate, the “particulate coarse matter”—more commonly known as dust found on farms and ranches, how much water we have in our toilets, and one of the newest ones: What kind of anti-bacterial soap we use to wash our hands. That’s right, the EPA’s overstepping of authority now touches almost every aspect of our lives. So, if you’re a mom who has been using the same soap for years to protect your children from spreading germs, sorry. You need to go to the pharmacy and buy some new “improved” EPA-authorized soap. While you’re there, you should pick up a box of only-Made-in-China compact fluorescent bulbs—because thanks to the EPA—incandescent bulbs will be banned by 2014.

Despite the unconstitutionality of government controlling every aspect of our lives, we’re left without any grounds for why this nanny state is needed. The EPA has not adequately defended its destructive policies. Recently, the EPA has chosen to miss several Capitol Hill hearings. My colleague Joe Barton fairly referred to them as the “Evaporating Personnel Administration.” But when the EPA has actually chosen to show up for a hearing, what Congress has heard from its administrators is worrisome. This month, EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus testified before the House Environment and Energy Subcommittee. Congressman Cory Gardener (R.-Colo.) asked Administrator Stanislaus whether the EPA took job creation into account when it analyzes new regulations. This simple question sent Stanislaus on a five-minute-long frenzy, where he let it slip that the EPA could care less about job creation. Apparently, the EPA comes up with regulations in the marble palace without considering the effect that its policies will have on job creation. You can’t make this stuff up.

The reality is that the EPA policies are driving up energy costs at a time when gas is nearly $5 a gallon, destroying jobs when unemployment is hovering at 8%, and sending companies overseas at a time when investment in America is at a low. Many of these regulations—such as regulating dust on farms—just make no sense.

. . . Obama has pretty much said the same thing several times. In a New York Times Magazine profile last October, the president admitted he had to learn the hard way that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

This is a staggering indictment of the president, the team he assembled, and the journalists who accepted this administration’s arrogant assertions that they knew exactly what to do, how to do it, and what would happen as a result. Remember, this is the administration that to this day insists it is “pragmatic” and simply cares about “what works.”

“I think we can get a lot of work done fast,” President-elect Obama said shortly after a gathering of governors in December 2008. “All of them have projects that are shovel-ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door.”

Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden — the White House’s point man on the stimulus — said in a cable-news interview in February 2009: “I think what people need to understand is that this really isn’t rocket science.” Spend a bundle on public works projects and — boom — you get a lot of people working.

They were wrong.

They were wrong not just about the effect of infrastructure spending — even an analysis by the Associated Press found no evidence unemployment was significantly improved by the Recovery Act’s public-works projects — but they were wrong about the existence of shovel-ready jobs in the first place. (They were also misleading, since only a tiny, tiny fraction of the stimulus went to any infrastructure at all. The bulk went to social programs.)

Back in October, when Obama admitted that he had to learn on the job that shovel-ready jobs don’t exist, then-governor Ed Rendell (D., Penn.) — a leader in the push for the stimulus — told the New York Times it was all a terrible misunderstanding. “When we said ‘shovel ready’ we meant ‘shovel ready’ in the way we do things.” He added, “I don’t think we meant to be deceptive.”

You’ve got to love the “I don’t think” there.

The “way we do things” involves endless paperwork, union regulations, environmental red tape, and the like. That’s why it only took 410 days to build the Empire State building and 16 months to build the Pentagon but nearly 20 years to complete Boston’s Big Dig. Lord knows how long it will be for the government to finish work on Ground Zero.

The point is that the president and his team came into office insisting that they were on top of things and above mere ideological considerations. When confronted with skepticism about the existence of “shovel-ready” projects, they in effect rolled their eyes and scoffed at the backseat drivers.

But they were the ones who were blinded by ideology. One need not be an ideologue to understand that public-works contracting has become bloated and inefficient. Indeed, one must be an ideologue of a certain kind not to understand that. Or one has to be incredibly naive. Or both.

Perhaps that’s why Obama’s real economic agenda never changed to fit the economic crisis. During the campaign he promised to reform health care and fight for a green economy. After the financial crisis, the “pragmatist” stuck to his outdated agenda, saying — surprise! — what the economy needs is the same agenda he promised before. So while he kept saying he was obsessed with job creation, he spent all of his political capital on health-care reform and energy. All the while, the White House tries to spin its agenda as something it’s not.

For instance, you know where this jobs-council meeting took place? At Cree Inc., an LED lightbulb maker. Under the supposedly jobs-boosting stimulus, Cree received $5.2 million. According to Recovery.gov, that $5.2 million created 3.02 jobs. That’s $1,716,171 per job.

There’s a funny joke in there somewhere, but I don’t think Obama wants to tell it.

Approximately 1.5 million jobs have been lost since the “stimulus” was signed in 2009 — roughly 300,000 of them as administration officials hopped from town to town promoting the “summer of recovery.” The national unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in May — far above the 8 percent promised by the White House — and has averaged 9.5 percent throughout the Obama presidency.

The president can call this a “bump in the road,” or blame ATMs, or joke that those “shovel ready” jobs that were promised “weren’t as shovel ready as we expected.” But there’s nothing funny about policies that keep workers on the unemployment line and drive us deeper into debt. Those aren’t the kinds of results — and this isn’t the recovery — the American people deserve.