EVs are the stuff of myths. So many myths:
• They’re too expensive! (Nope.)
• Their batteries hemorrhage range as soon as you drive them off the lot! (Noooooope.)
• Worthless in cold weather! (Nope! And Norway!)
• They’re less green than normal cars! (NOPE.)
Let’s put that last old argument out to pasture once and for all ….
It can be hard to conceive of an issue as big as climate change. Global warming is, after all, global — geographically but also as an idea. Reflecting its sprawling unknowability, some environmentalists like to say “think globally, act globally.” Others use the invented term “glocal” to describe a phenomenon that’s both planetary in scale and also felt and fought locally.
Still others — especially those themselves impacted — address the problem as purely locally as they do the rest of their lives.
This feels like momentum, folks.
The Guardian: “Three-quarters of Australians back target of net zero by 2030, Guardian Essential poll shows.”
Must each of us witness destruction like Australia has seen before we reach this conclusion… or have we all seen enough?
Net zero by 2030. If we want to survive in a world that’s something like the one we live in now, we must all be like the Australians, and demand nothing less than that.
And then work our dingoes off for it ….
All the days after Thanksgiving have become sanctified shopping days: “Black Friday,” followed by “Small-Business Saturday,” followed by a quiet holy day to get rested and prepared for “Cyber Monday,” which is the day you’re supposed to continue shopping while on the clock at your job. “Giving Tuesday” stands at the end of the line, ringing a bell and giving you the guilty side eye after all this shopobacchanalia.
It’s easy enough to sigh in anguish, Charlie-Brown-like, about the consumerist spectacle, but a little empathy may be in order too. After all, for a stressed-out, disconnected, compromised human organism, shopping is an easy, dopamine-triggering pleasure. Through the 20th century, it became the way comfortable modern people in comfortable modern societies expressed their comfortable modernity… and it was how we children and grandchildren of that century grew up.
The 21st century added to the recipe plentiful plastics, round-the-clock R&D, disposable LEDs, 24/7 marketing, microchips as cheap as potato chips, and a competitive international labor market. So today, we consume all products as consumables. We consume everything as if it’s disposable. ….
It’s November 2020, and we know we have one decade to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. We can achieve this, but the sheer scale of the problem means it’s all hands on deck.
The question for each of us is — leaving aside reducing our own impact — what can people actually do if they don’t have a Ph.D., an endowment, or an audience of millions to influence?
These days on Zoom, one answer you hear a lot is “organize, organize, organize.” But what does THAT mean? For many of us, organizing means finding an existing organization, cause, or group that really speaks to us …
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