energy != power --- argh!!!

Last year, as energy prices rose, I was appalled by fluffy and just wrong pieces in the popular media.  I started counting instances where energy and power were mangled and gave up at fifty in less than two months.

This morning someone sent a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the end of the romance with cars.  I don't know if the author needs to attempt to define things, but he manages to screw things up - one wonders if there was any proof reading by anyone who remembered any high school physics.

I realize he is only trying to make the point that there is a lot of power (at least on a human scale) available in a car, but why does he have to underscore that he doesn't understand what he is talking about?

snip:

Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”