You have to wonder sometimes how our ancestors managed to survive without a strong federal government to regulate away all their problems — and tax them for the privilege. We should be thankful.

That was the apparent message in a recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial excoriating a Trump White House that “does all it can to ignore the real danger of climate change” while “threatening to exacerbate the problem by eliminating a tax credit designed to bolster electric-car sales.” The editorial urges Congress to extend the credit and boost electric car sales “to switch from vehicles that contribute inordinately to global warming.”

That’s pie-in-the-sky logic, of course. Electricity might be clean energy at the wall socket, but at the power plant, electric generation remains a dirty business. American coal consumption stood at 332.1 million tons of oil equivalent (toe) in 2017. Ranked globally, that’s a distant No. 3 behind China (1.9 billion toe) and India (424 million toe).

Why do we now measure coal consumption in toe? The plain answer is that government is preparing us for a carbon tax. There now exist formulas for converting coal, oil, natural gas and other metered fossil fuels into standard units for the purpose of taxing them.

We have been told repeatedly that a carbon tax will discourage the consumption of fossil fuels and this will slow the pace of global warming.

The facts are clear, says the St. Louis paper: “Global temperatures are rising at an alarming rate, as greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide increase. ... Those gases are produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, and automobiles are a major culprit. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 28 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, with passenger vehicles making up the majority of them.”

There’s an old saying that the devil’s in the details, and there are two devils lurking here.

The first devil is that the carbon tax isn’t so much about carbon as it is about tax. It’s yet another political money grab, pure and simple.

The second devil is that average citizen, who is already living paycheck to paycheck, can’t afford to have his or her assets tied up in carbon credits. They won’t care about a tax credit toward the purchase of an electric car when the conventional vehicle costs thousands of dollars less — and a gallon of gasoline now sells for less money than it did two years ago.

When Eastman Kodak introduced the Brownie camera in 1900, you could buy one for a dollar — less than the cost of manufacture. Kodak knew it would make its profits on film processing and prints. The notion of a government tax credit probably never occurred to Kodak or its investors.

In the way that the Brownie was Kodak’s loss-leader for selling film and processing services, electric cars are intended to be the government’s loss-leader for a carbon tax — a tax that doesn’t really care what unit of energy fuels your car since electricity can be generated out of anything from wind to nuclear power — and taxed equally. No interruptions, no price fluctuations, no Gulf-war standoffs or pipeline shutoffs to worry about.

It seems certain that electric cars are the future. But let the technology advance on its own merits and with the consumers’ eyes wide open.