— from Bill Appel —
You attend lectures, subscribe to emails, newsletters and magazines, and buy books describing environmental degradation and the resulting death, destruction and misery suffered by all forms of life, and the sometimes heroic, sometimes illegal, and sometimes quixotic, actions of those on the front lines. You donate to environmental causes. Your most simpatico friends do the same. You see them at gatherings and protests to which many drive. Do you?
If you do, look around the parking area. Do you see any EVs there? Is one yours? If not, ask yourself why not. For many of us the up-front barrier is financial, even though over time ownership and operation, repairs and fuel cost less than the alternative.
For those of us who can afford to rent or buy an EV (used ones are far less expensive) our habitual and therefore unthinking reliance on fossil fuels nevertheless runs deep. The barrier is a state of mind fed by “range anxiety,” that curious fear of mindfulness that makes us behave reactively rather than proactively.
As you already know, this state of mind is very expensive for the environment. If it’s time to replace your current vehicle, you know what to do.
Also note that Wildlife Cycles offers a great line of electric pedal-assist bicycles that really tame the hills of Orcas.
The electric bike idea is very good, as you actual conserve energy. It takes far less energy to move a bike than moving a car. Your peddling helps too. Conserving energy means LESS CO2 emissions.
Buying that new (or used, if you want to risk buying a new battery) EV will certainly reduce your fuel cost. You can even fuel it up for free at Island Market using OPALCO’s station (paid for by OPALCO’s electric customers). Electricity from OPALCO is far less expensive than gasoline.
Why not ask yourself “Where does the electricity charging my new EV come from?” Is there spare hydro generation out there just waiting to fill my EV up? Well, not really.
The electricity you use must come from generating plants that are not now being full utilized. These plants would be the highest cost plants on the electric grid (if they were low cost, they would already be running). The high cost plants run on COAL. So your EV is being fuel by COAL generation. That is a whole lot of CO2.
Any by the way, don’t forget to have your old car sent to the scrap pile. Don’t trade it in. If you do, it will be out there continuing to pollute while you are driving your new EV on COAL.
I support fully the need for a transition away from fossil fuels.
But I have never reconciled a basic fact I learned from my physics prof while living in the mountains: I could not generate enough electricity during a town-trip to drive back up the mountain .. that generally speaking there is an 80% loss of energy every time you convert from one form to another, in this case kinetic energy from gravity to electric storage and back to kinetic. It is a basic fact relating to the first law of thermodynamics.
So in the case of electric cars, especially the “hybrids,” every time you think you are saving by recharging the battery by running the gas engine, you are only saving 20% on your emissions. Their real saving is through burning fuel under very efficient low-load circumstances and by shutting down when stopped in traffic. [btw of little benefit living on Orcas.]
..Intuitively one can sense that a vehicle that requires an engine that gets so dangerously hot that you cannot touch it or its exhaust, must be losing a ton of energy to convert chemical energy to electric energy by burning something.. over 80% loss, and then finally electric to kinetic transportation.. 96% net loss.
There is no free lunch, and much of the perceived “savings” of EV’s relies on this fallacy of physics, plus an illusion created by sneaking that power conversion in quietly when we aren’t looking. But it came from somewhere. Always. And the only convenient form of energy that starts as electric and finishes as electric in kinetic transportation, one conversion, is solar.
Right? then wind and water, with moving parts.
So all these clear lines that we draw between “clean” or not is more a matter of degree, that is negotiable, economic, political.
The basic problem is that to get a loaf of bread so to speak, we first wrap it in hundreds of pounds of metal, glass, plastic and chemistry to get it home.
Er, second law..