Last week I saw the first Leaf of spring.

Actually, it the first Leaf I’ve ever seen: a Nissan Leaf, headed west on I-8. I think it was pale green, but I was driving into the sun and trying to stay in my lane, change the radio station – enough Florence and the Machine already – and check out the Leaf, all at the same time. I only saw it for a few seconds, so I can’t be sure about the color, but I was sure about the familiar feeling that surged through me: desire for material goods.Want Leaf. Must have Leaf.

The Leaf, of course, is Nissan’s new electric car. Just plug it into the sun, and off you go.

The big knock on the Leaf is its limited range – up to 100 miles, according to Nissan, but MIT’s Technology Reviewpegs it, under most driving conditions, at more like 62-73. Which happens to be plenty.

Look, the Leaf doesn’t work for just about anybody as a first, main car. But as Car #2, the run-around-town car, it’s perfect. Gotta drive to Carlsbad or L.A. or San Francisco or Vancouver? That’s what the gas quaffer is for. Go downtown, to the mall, to the beach, to take your turn carpooling after school? Hop in, kids – don’t keep the electrons waiting.

Now, saying “Just plug it into the sun” is at least partly facetious, because most of us (so far) haven’t gone solar. But in terms of energy use, the Nissan burns (“burns”? Whatever) just under 40 kilowatt hours of juice to equal a gallon of gasoline. Technology Reviewsays that works out to about 99 miles per gallon. Not half bad, huh? Not a third bad, even, considering that 33 MPG is looked upon as pretty good mileage these days.

(Some decades back, my Datsun B-210 hatchback was getting around 32 MPG. We haven’t exactly been all over this energy-independence thing.)

As it happens, though, here at our house we have gone solar – they don’t call it “Sunny San Diego” for nothing – and there’s a fantasy scene I can’t get out of my head: hooking up the Leaf to our home charging station, then stepping back and watching the photons pour down on our solar panels and transmogrify into electrons (that part’s a little hazy), which then gather themselves up, get in line, take a deep, collective breath (this is a little anthropomorphic, but you get the idea), and flow happily into the Leaf’s welcoming battery.

Now, I know that’s not quite how it happens; most solar arrays are very much on the grid, for one thing, feeding electricity in when it’s sunny and shutting down when it’s too cloudy or too night-y.

For another, it’s better to charge up your car at night, taking pressure off the daytime grid. But when I go Leaf (or later equivalent), that’s the way I’ll choose to perceive the goings-on.

And the whole thing’s just so damn depressing.

We’re going to end up spending more than $1 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s some simple math: If each home-rooftop solar array cost $25,000 – which is high, to keep the estimate from being optimistic – $1 trillion would buy 40 million of them. Except if we were buying them by the tens of millions, they’d cost half that. So $1 trillion would buy about 80 million – one for just about every single-family house in the U.S. of A. And with that solar array, the average home could power everything electrical on the premises and have enough left over to send the Leaf down the road a good ways.

Yeah, I know, that’s not how the world works; no way were we going to all of a sudden say, “Instead of fighting this useless war, let’s take all the money it was going to cost us and do something unimaginably smart, and take a huge step toward energy independence and cutting back on greenhouse gases.”

But still, it highlights the choices we’ve made … the choices we’re making. Most societies in collapse can’t see what’s happening, or they choose, for short-term convenience, to ignore it. The Romans probably thought they’d be on top forever.

So, for that matter, did (does?) Charlie Sheen. What do you want to bet he doesn’t drive a Leaf?