I have reached the stage where the endless garbage landslide of negative stories and opinion pieces about renewable energy, electric ground transport and any form of clean technology just slide past me without leaving a skid mark.
I live in a world where I know electric cars work, where range anxiety is a lobbyists myth, where the massive benefits of renewable energy are obvious and tangible and where my knowledge of what is going on around the world allows me to ignore the petty narrow anxieties spread about in any one country.
I’m not bothered by insecure men who tell me they need to be able to tow a 3 ton trailer 4,000 kilometres in one day.
If making that statement on Twitter makes them happy, it’s fine, it’s harmless and we can all ignore them.
The people I do worry about are the likes of Dave (I won’t use his real name) who left this comment on an old Fully Charged SHOW episode on YouTube.
“I was so close to pulling the trigger on an electric car this year but all the negative press has put me off, will soldier on with my diesel for a few more years I think.”
Now, with a vagaries of YouTube comments and the peculiarities of some odd human beings, it’s hard to know if this is some subtle form of trolling or a genuine reflection of what ‘Dave’ is experiencing.
I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and plumb for the latter. There are possibly millions of people around the globe who might, in a perfect world, be prepared to consider changing to a less toxic form of ground transport, but have been quite understandably put off by the torrent of misinformation the traditional media, and some extremists on social media pump out every minute.
In the long run, and with all due respect to him, Dave’s decision is unimportant, just as mine is with deciding to start driving 100% electric cars 14 years ago.
The change is happening anyway, regardless of what old broken bullies like the Daily Mail, Fox News keep ranting about. Around the world the shift to electric ground transport has passed the ‘will-we-won’t-we’ stage of tech adoption.
It’s as if those dated media outlets ranted against smart phones back in the early days of iPhone and Android phones
. . . oh wait, they did. ‘What’s wrong with a Blackberry’ they wailed.
Electric ground transport is going to happen, like it or not. And notice I said ground transport, not cars. It’s going to be the power behind everything that moves along on wheels. From the biggest truck to the smallest cargo bike, and everything in between.
Not because of image, greenwashing, virtue signalling or any other nightmare fantasy the fossil lobby regurgitate, but because economics.
Electric ground transport makes sense now economically, and in 5 years time, burning liquid fuel in a combustion engine will be economic suicide.
But Dave’s understandable hesitation is a problem because we need to change the technology we use really fast. In the next 7 years.
Likewise with renewables, even with all the challenges relying on the weather brings up, the advantages of being powered by a 100% renewable, sustainable power grid are so huge and the work arounds are already known and understood.
It’s a massive task, it’s not impossible but it is a massive task.
In a country like Australia where I am currently residing, it’s not that big a task simply because the population is not that massive and the land area and weather make a switch to 100% renewables and 100% electric transport utterly doable.
However the resistance to such an idea is reaching a fever pitch, loads of old men in suits (Murdoch at the helm of course) are furious and determined to hold back this progress as hard as they can.
So ‘Dave’ is fine, he will drive this diesel for a few more years, but once the second hand EV market starts to really grow, I know his next car will be electric. And it will be better to drive, last longer and be cheaper to fuel and maintain than the diesel car he uses now.
And it would be so much better again if Dave never bought a car of any type, but either used a flexible lease or a car sharing scheme, both of which help reduce the number of cars we need.
While that might happen over the next couple of generations, what has to happen really fast is the global adoption of WSB, (Wind, Solar, Batteries) which is an energy system that does work, regardless of the thunder clouds of reactionary scare stories, and electric ground transport.
Dave will be fine, his children will be better off. It will happen.
