Day: May 22, 2024

Electric Vehicles are Not a Panacea

Fandango33 Comments

I’m writing this as a post, rather than as a very long comment on Marilyn Armstrong’s post from earlier today, “Electrifying Everything.” I encourage you to read Marilyn’s very well written post before reading this post. Go ahead. I’ll wait a few minutes for you to do that and return.

Ah, welcome back. Yes, as Marilyn said, EVs are not the answer, the panacea, that will save the planet from climate change. Yes, the cost of EVs needs to come down to where they are comparable to similarly equipped gas-powered cars. And that will happen sooner, rather than later. And yes, our government and the transportation industry need to address the dearth of fast charging stations outside of big cities (and even in big cities). Fast charging stations need to be as ubiquitous as are gas pumps today.

But, as an EV owner for almost three years now, I’d like to address two claims about EVs that I think are misleading. First is the claim that people don’t like the way electric cars are built.

I don’t understand how not liking the way they are built can be an issue. Most electric cars on the market (excluding Tesla) are built by Ford, GM, Chrysler, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, BMW, Audi, etc. These are the same companies that build traditional gas-powered cars. So what’s behind people not liking how EVs are built when they are built by the same companies as traditional cars? There is ONE study (and the only such study I could find) from Consumer Reports that claims that the reliability of EVs is less than that of gas-powered vehicles. That same study said that the reliability of plug-in hybrids is even worse. But I’ve had my EV for almost three years and have had zero reliability issues.

Second, people are allegedly concerned about the “expensive maintenance issues that are part of the package.”

The truth is that EV maintenance costs are way lower than that of comparable gas-powered cars. EVs have fewer moving parts than gas cars. There are no oil changes, and regenerative braking reduces wear on traditional brakes. Again, I have paid zero dollars in maintenance costs for my EV since I drove it off the lot on August 12, 2022. Zero dollars!

So, yes, the EV alone is not going to end climate change. It’s not meant to be THE solution to climate change. But EVs emit zero pollutants into the atmosphere, and once the price of EVs come down and once charging stations are readily available nationwide, that zero emissions fact will have a positive affect on our climate.

We just need the fossil fuel industry and the GOP politicians to agree to support — rather than fight tooth and nail — the migration to EVs from gas guzzlers. If that could happen, we will go a long way toward cleaner air and maybe even be able to slow down the inevitable catastrophe that climate change will have.

As a nation, we should be encouraging people to buy electric vehicles when and where it makes sense. We need to stop giving people excuses for not considering driving an EV just because some consider EVs to not be the one solution that will halt climate change. How naive can you be?

Image credit: https://blog.evsolutions.com.

Sunday Six Sentence Story — Light and Airy

Fandango15 Comments

I try to keep things light and airy in my posts and to infuse at least a hint of humor and wit in them.

It’s my way of escaping the gloom and doom of a reality that weighs heavily upon me.

It’s my mental mechanism to push back into the recesses of my mind the political insanity that is raging all around me.

Keep it bright, keep it airy, keep it chipper I say to myself, perhaps naively.

Try to avoid, I remind myself, going toward the dark path that those, whose values are so markedly different from my own, are leading others down.

But it’s hard to follow the light when it seems to be growing dimmer and more distant with each passing day.

Written for the Sunday Six Sentence Story prompt from Girlie on the Edge, my first time writing for this prompt. The prompt word is “light.” AI artwork from Bing Image Creator.

Four Line Fiction — The Casualties of War

Fandango6 Comments

The despots or the generals who decide to make war
Are not the ones who pay the price for that decision
It’s the innocents who are the casualties who pay the price
It’s the innocents who lose the battle no matter who wins the war.

Written for Greg’s Four Line Fiction prompt. Photo credit: Ali Jadallah / Anadolu / Getty Images.

WDP — Back in the Day

Fandango10 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Do you have any collections?
View all responses

Warning: I’ve written about this topic several times before so if you’ve already suffered through my tragic story about my collections of baseball cards and comic books, feel free to move on.

To answer the daily prompt question directly, I do not currently have any collections. However, when I was a lad, I used to collect comic books, baseball cards, and my two favorite humor magazines, MAD and National Lampoon.

The comic books, mostly superhero-type comics from DC Comics and Marvel, cost ten cents each back then. MAD and National Lampoon were a quarter each. The packs of baseball cards, sold by Topps and Fleet, cost a nickel each and included seven baseball cards and a flat, square piece of pink bubblegum.

Each month when the new editions were published, I would ride my bike to the newsstand in town, where I’d buy five comic books and two packages of baseball cards. I’d ride my bike back home and take the wrappers off of the packages of baseball cards and sort them out. And after reading the comic books, I’d stack them in piles based upon the characters.

I continued to buy baseball cards and comic books for years until I got distracted when I was about 17 by girls. But in the meantime, I had built up a significant collection of both comic books and baseball cards.

I kept the more recent comic book issues in my bedroom and the older issues in the basement of my parents’ home, along with my cherished baseball cards.

What became of my prized collections of comic books and baseball cards? It’s a sad story, actually. After high school I headed off to college for four years. When I returned home after graduating, I discovered that my vast — and priceless — collections of both comic books and baseball cards were missing.

I asked my father about them and he told me that he had thrown them away, explaining that he needed the space in the basement for some other purpose. “Besides,” he said, “that was kid stuff. You’re an adult now.”

More recently…

I also had a large collection of classic rock LPs. And by “LP” I don’t mean liquid propane. You remember what LPs are right. They are “long-playing” analog vinyl phonograph records recorded at a speed of 33+1⁄3 rpm on a 12-inch disk.

Anyway, I had hundreds of these classic rock albums that I had collected over the years until vinyl albums were replaced by music CDs and, ultimately by MP3 recordings and music streaming services.

But when we moved from Massachusetts to a condo in San Francisco, I knew I had to downsize, so I had a garage sale where I sold for fifty cents each (or gave away the leftovers) all of the albums, since I had most of them represented in MP3 format on my iPod and iPhone.

One-Liner Wednesday — Only He Can Fix It

Fandango4 Comments

“Donald Trump seems to live to break rules, do anything for attention, and make a mess that he then claims he alone can fix.”

Jack Gescheidt, a San Rafael, California resident wrote in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle

Written for Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt.