It has felt this summer like we are on a highway to hell. The roads themselves have been literally melting, and we had better get used to it. We are heading to a new climate reality, with more and more records being broken around rising temperatures, fires, droughts and other extreme weather events.
In this new reality I think it is imperative that we accept the overwhelming science behind the fact that climate change is man-made, and rather than sit by, actually help by voting for change, with our ballots and our wallets.
Science is not a democracy, and facts should speak for themselves, but if they did we wouldn't need science communicators so badly. I stand with the 97% of scientists who have found with a mountain of evidence that climate change is real, and is man-made. Acknowledging my part in this madness based on the fact that I am well-travelled and am leading the average consumerist middle class life, two years ago I bought an electric vehicle.
If I'm going to hell in a handbasket I thought to myself, I'll be damned if it's not the nicest, greenest handbasket with the least direct trajectory to hell that I can afford.
On the bright side, we are living at the end of the age of the internal combustion engine. The economist front page about this came out (with a lovely cartoon of a dead carcass of an engine) a while ago, but still the uptake of electric vehicles is slow, and the major car manufacturers (See MAZDA's new petrol engine*) seem to be in denial putting even more research and development into making their old invention better and more efficient.
Saying that, there are at least 2 committee members that now own EVs (including myself) and at work there is one hybrid and 2 EVs so thing are changing.
So what is so good about EVs I hear you ask? Well apart from the fact that they are cheaper to own (almost no maintenance and equivalent of 30cents per ltr to charge), more reliable (not the 100s of moving parts other cars have), cleaner cradle to grave (this is true even in Poland where power stations run on coal), safer (the Tesla Model X was the safest SUV ever according to US govt. testing), quieter, and faster* (if you like that sort of thing) , they do not vibrate me into a dull sense of rage on the way to work.
The New Zealand government webpage about electric vehicles* says “New Zealand is well suited” for that type of vehicle. After listing facts as to why they are a good idea, they go on to say “Barriers include misconceptions about electric vehicles, and limited public charging infrastructure”. As I'm not in the business of installing charging infrastructure, I'd like to take this opportunity to bust some of the misconceptions and take a skeptical view of the myths that are going around.
One misconception is that they are inconvenient and it takes ages to charge, and until that problem is solved and until there are at least as many charge points as there are petrol stations, they just aren't a practical alternative.
I'd like to flip that and ask you to imagine how annoying it would be to have to take your mobile phone down to the dairy and wait, outside, under a canopy, in the rain, wind or snow, for at least 5 minutes to charge it up once a week? That seems a ridiculous scenario doesn't it, because you just charge your phone at home by plugging it in right? Do you even know how long it takes to charge your phone? Neither do I – I just charge and it's ready when I need it. The same goes for my car.
Now imagine never having to go to the petrol station again. Quite a nice thought isn't it.
Won't there be brownouts if all the cars plug in at once? No there won't *. In fact there are already enough power stations up and running and with approved consents to power 100% of the light vehicle fleet with electricity. How soon that happens is up to us.
Faster:
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/supercar/a-list-of-the-fastest-production-cars-in-history
Cheaper:
Cleaner:
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions#.WlhsjMuYbqA
More reliable:
https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/electrek.co/2017/10/20/bolt-reliable-chevy/amp/
Safer:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/13/technology/tesla-model-x-safety-rating/index.html
Canterbury University talk—What if we all drove electric cars?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9gRS7PK6TP0
NZ Govt website:
https://www.energywise.govt.nz/on-the-road/electric-vehicles/