NOT mia

Not Mia

It has been a very humid week here in the northeast, very humid and quite hot, a very discomfiting pairing. Everyone who steps out of their air-conditioned homes knows it and feels it immediately. After some time outdoors walking or working they feel it more and more the longer they work or walk. I drive an electric car with thankfully effective air conditioning, allowing me to cocoon myself in dry and cool comfort as I travel to work sites, to buy groceries. The rub? This record heat and humidity takes its toll in battery depletion and therefore range. This is not due to a mistake in design, but instead a reflection of a reality. The AC compressor requires power to operate and that power is the same power that an electrically powered automobile uses to move forward. Does it not stand to reason that one should eschew the new fangledness of an EV and propel themselves forward in a vehicle powered by a trustworthy internal combustion engine? Not so fast. While Electric motors convert only 85 percent of their power, electrical energy, a B+, into moving your vehicle forward, internal combustion engines F in with a 40 percent score. Along with the wasteful heat and noise of an IC is the “free” power of the air conditioner. A bit like getting a 10 percent discount on a hotel room for which you are already being grossly overcharged. This leads or perhaps begins with a difference in mindset. An EV owner is moment by moment reminded that forward motion, AC, heating, radio use, that nothing is free. There is no magical free power. Regenerative braking is a bit like free power, as is power to refill one’s battery derived from solar energy. Even those sources are not free of course, but simply, like EV motors themselves, a bit more efficient. Right wing screeds against EV technology, pointing to filthy beginnings, waste, battery disposal, range and fantastical “free power” thinking are all deserved, except when they wander into conflation and lies. The problem is of course, that what is bad about the silent EV goose is doubly bad for the loud and smelly IC gander. A thoughtful EV owner knows … Let’s pause a moment. There are of course careless, wasteful EV owners. They may have to try hard to waste as much energy as the driver of an IC powered car, but try they must. OK. Should we BLAME those who drive internal combustion cars.? How ridiculous. Not everyone is ready for an EV, or lives in a place with the proper infrastructure to senisbly own one. Also, there are fewer EVs in the used car pipeline, making them less available to those without the income to buy new, which is most of everyone. When should a person switch? When it is right for them of course. This is not to say that manufacturers of automobiles should be given the same pass. The government has been subsidizing and “pushing” uphill, gasoline powered vehicles and for many decades. It is time we give EVs a push. Oh, about those IC engines. They have become remarkably efficient, but still require upwards of two thousand parts to make their way. Two thousand. EVs? They make do with twenty or so parts. This is the engine only and not the braking system used in IC vehicles to scrub off some of the 40% of the power they are generating from fossil fuels when stopping is called for. Oh but EVs run on coal and gas anyhow, so there. If exclusively true, their greater efficiency would still make them energy winners. Many EV owners power their cars by solar energy however. Leave an IC out in the sun and all you will get is a thigh burn when you hop in wearing golf shorts. The home my wife and I share is not a solar panel candidate, so we instead bought in to a nearly solar farm. Not complicated and not expensive to do. 

In closing, a thoughtful EV owner knows that global warming, environmental destruction, the ending of species is very much their fault. They accept the embarrassing, painful mia culpa of earthly human existence. Those who worship IC vehicle technology however do not have to deal with the pain. Why? Because global warming, environmental destruction and the ending of species, none of these is real and if real, none are their fault. Therefore, these things, if real and if terrible, are clearly someone else’s real and terrible fault. A recent FOX report on Germany’s energy plight, in light of their dependence on Russian oil and in light of Russian aggression in Ukraine, laid blame, squarely on the slight if sturdy shoulders of, wait for it, Greta Thunberg. So, the next time you make a four wheel burnout in your pickup, wasting gas and tires both, in a gloriously vociferous Fuck You to the world and your fellow citizens, only to find yourself visiting, a sad man with a sad motorized prostate, again facing the familiar urinal of a gas pump, remember this, somewhere in Sweden a 19 year old woman is to blame.