[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Watching the Keystone pipeline fight it occurred to me that the age of personal machines (mainly the automobile) is just smudging the centurion mark, it was right around this time 100 years ago competing technologies for expensive personal cars started an amazing machine wave into American life. Steam, electric and internal combustion were all viably in the mix, with of course internal combustion the eventual winner in the market. Within 40 years millions of internal combustion machines crawled and flew over the planet, completely transforming the American experience.
Well, we blew that one. A simple mistake of clean ignorance, total unawareness that internal combustion pollutants were completely unviable to earthly biological existence. We’ll cook our planet and our country into something totally unrecognizable in 2 generations if we don’t change, so it’s time to switch to electrons for automobiles. This is the great logistical challenge of our age, our generation, right now. Technically easy, seemingly politically impossible.
I’m a middle-aged white guy, two cars and a house, a family and the normal range of American psychology for our times. I’m ridiculously conventional in appearance and manners, to classify me as some fringe hippie environmentalist is absurd in the extreme. It’s just time to accept that as a race and people we made a totally understandable mistake in choosing internal combustion, time to switch to electrons, let’s get to it.
Yes, we have the total solution right in our hands, I’m not the sort of person to be petulantly alarmist without offering a path forward. Electric cars are completely viable in technology and price this very moment, to keep things simple we as a people can take on this challenge easily.
To wander peripherally momentarily, what about jets? Our biggest future adjustment will be slow flying in electric blimps. What about trucking? Pneumatic freight will have to transform to short-range hubs around electric rail. What about shipping? The only real unknown here, something vastly slower utilizing wind and battery will have to be employed.
Now then, it’s quite enough as a people to get rid of internal combustion in our cars, a vastly worthy goal meriting no distractions as a start to alleviating global warming. Right now batteries are too expensive and seriously need research, so triple the current electric car subsidy and start a crash Manhattan-like research program for batteries.
We can’t do this, it’s too expensive? Oh shut up, you know? We spend 2 Manhattan projects a year on total failure in Afghanistan, we have for ten freaking years, what precisely has this delivered to the little people of America?
Was a time before all this hideous endless war on the terra when America was a bright inventing place, rock music and computers and video games and space machines and amazing universities everywhere, folks happily flocked here to study and play without being abused at the airport. We were totally renowned on the planet as very energetic, inventive optimistic people until we became such badass drone killers and we will again, we have to be, we can easily switch to electric cars and we will.
Imagine no more filthy choking smog, no more oil changes or transmission fluid, no gas stations, no pipelines, no tankers fouling Alaska, no more nasty background worry we're ruining the planet for future generations. Sounds awful, eh?
You’re telling me that we as Americans, with all our history of invention and optimism, can’t build a smart grid and supporting solar structure to make electric cars happen? Heh.
So politically it’s totally impossible, you’re just the tiniest of an American with no way to take on the power of the oil companies. Well, they can happily survive in the vast synthetic material market, oh woe for them, and I refuse to believe that Americans will be so willfully stupid for so many continuing generations with the answers right in our hands.
Our people desperately need solar conversion jobs, a political representation can’t occur with that element so painfully with us? What about all the health and geopolitical benefits from abandoning oil, those will somehow be ignored too?
Again, if you are a politician of any stripe or position, and especially if you aspire to go into public political office, champ down on electric cars like a bulldog, American folks will listen to you and flock to your position. Our young people will do so much for you, they want a planet and life like we were given. Stop the wars on terra and drugs for a real job on switching to electrons and an extremely bright political future is yours.