EV's (That's Short for "Electric Vehicles")

Lately, all of a sudden, I've been paying a lot more attention to the cars around me. Specifically, I've been looking for EV's, electrical vehicles. For years, I'd already been spotting Toyota Priuses, which are gasoline, electric hybrids, because of their distinctive body shape. But besides the Priuses, there are more hybrids and pure EV's around me than I had thought.

This afternoon I saw a Tesla Model 3 in a parking lot nearby. I've been looking at so many Teslas online lately that this one looked familiar from a long way away, and I came up for a close look, and sure enough. It surprised me that I was right, because none of the Teslas -- to my way of thinking -- is nearly as distinctive-looking as, say, a Prius. Many Tesla fans would denounce me for this opinion, because to them, Teslas are distinctive-looking and very uniquely beautiful. And who am I to try to minimize their joy in beauty. Lately, I've seen either several Tesla Model S's, or the same Model S several times. The Model S is a rather expensive model which Tesla first started selling in 2012. The Model 3

is a less expensive model which went on sale in 2017, and which will surely soon surpass all of the other Tesla models, going back to 2008, in number of units sold, if it hasn't already. (As of the end of 2018, combined sales of all other Tesla models added up to almost 400,000 units.) One of the Model S's zoomed past me very quickly on the right, accomplishing being ahead of me instead on behind me when the road narrowed down to single-lane single-file. I was startled, and yelled out the window, "Was that really necessary?!" Yes, I still sometimes yell at other drivers. But I'm trying to stop once and for all. I don't road rage as much as I used to.

Since I've been looking at the rear fender of every single car I walk past lately, I've been seeing the green badge on the back of many Fords which says "EcoBoost." I've been having a hard time finding concrete information about EcoBoost, information such as: is there actually anything ecological about EcoBoost, or is the name just a cynical ploy on Ford's part to make buyers think they're being green?

I saw a BMW i8, a very high-end, very sporty hybrid, and spoke to its owner, but soon got the impression that many strangers talked to him about his car and he was tired of it, so I left him alone.

A Tesla driver might be more green, in his personal transportation carbon footprint, than an ICE (internal-combustion engine) driver. If the Tesla driver gets his electricity from solar or wind, then there's no maybe about it. A Nissan Leaf driver might have a smaller carbon footprint than the Tesla driver. Someone who has no car and takes the bus might be greener still, especially if the local buses are green. There are other factors besides whether you drive a car and what kind of car you drive, such as how many miles per year you drive. And airline travel is very dirty, ship travel too, although some ships are much cleaner than others. Many ships are hybrids now. So are many trains. And of course, many trains have been all-electric for a very, very long time. And transportation is only a fraction of the current total hydrocarbon usage. So, I'm just saying: if you drive a Prius or a Tesla: Thank you. But don't forget that there are also many other things you can do, or not do, to help us all survive our own activity.

Go Green

Two commercials: one is a dorky ad for BMW with Couric and Gumbel in an all-electric vehicle which was made in a wind-powered factory:



In the other a beautiful, statuesque woman with a hypnotic voice is spewing some horseshit about how wonderful fracking and offshore drilling are. How they could add hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economy. I wonder how many of those jobs would be because of increased demand for doctors and other health-care workers to cope with the more numerous cases of heart and lung disease, and skin cancer, and burn victims who lit a match in a house which was fracked under, and heat stroke, and funeral homes to commemorate those drowned in tsunamis, and so forth.

They're going to need some very beautiful actresses with extremely hypnotic voices to get me to forget that, now that we can build cars that run on electricity in factories that run on wind, we're not going to be needing so much oil and gas and coal. When the word finally gets around that plug-in electric vehicles currently have fuel costs about half those of hybrids, which in turn go about twice as far on a gallon of gasoline as their conventional counterparts, and that those costs will continue to sink as power generation becomes more efficient, and that green homes already produce more power than they use, and make money by selling their surplus to the grid, and that what goes for cars and trucks and homes is also applicable to trains and ships and planes and office buildings and factories, people simply won't want their petrochemicals so badly any more. They're going to have to truly hypnotize me, to make me completely unconscious and under their control, to get me to forget all of that.

I'm not talking about green technologies which are under development or theoretical, but technology already in use. We just need to spread the word that the new stuff is already here, and let the oil companies take their rightful place in the leper colony next to tobacco.

How many drivers right now have zero transportation fuel costs, because they live in green homes which produce a surplus even after they tank up their electric cars or trucks? Whatever the number is, one thing is certain: the number is going to grow, and word of such things will get around, and the cost of oil and gas -- compared with less than zero -- will grow less and less attractive even to those people who are just too fucking stupid to factor in the costs of petrochemicals' direct damage to people's health, and the costs of climate change.

But why take my word for any of this? Who am I? That's right: I'm nobody. Paul Krugman is somebody. Listen to him.

The only hope the petrochemical industry has left is misinformation. And so here it comes: the commercials telling us how yummy fracking is and how many jobs offshore drilling will bring. (Don't forget the jobs of the people cleaning up the spills which are actually noticed and then actually required to be cleaned up. Yes, the list of jobs created by big oil really does just go on and on.)