EV, Earth, and Me

My big news:  I bought an electric vehicle (EV). Now I feel so self-righteous that you might want to cross to the other side of the street if you see me approaching. I drive an all-electric, plug-in 2017 Nissan LEAF. I’m so smug that you would think I had built a fully functioning windmill in my garage out of rebar, old magazines, and coconuts. If I could get the car into my bed, I’d sleep with it. This purchase goes deep. It reflects my lifelong effort to preserve and protect miraculous Planet Earth. As early as the age of nine, I went door-to-door on my street to warn my neighbors that Acid Rain would fall over the Great Lakes if we didn’t change our polluting ways. No ways were changed. Acid Rain fell. I wonder if the neighbors remembered my warning. Perhaps they were not even aware of the arrival of Acid Rain, not “woke.” I learned at a young age that prophets of doom rarely get invited in for milk and cookies.

Remember when we drove our glass, paper, and plastic (conscientiously separated) to the recycling center? I felt self-righteous in those days for taking the time to wash out my peanut butter jars. There’s a family story about one time when my younger son cracked a bone in his leg playing soccer and on the way to the ER I stopped at the recycling center to dispose of the fermenting, smelly bottles so they wouldn’t bake in the sun in my car in the hospital parking lot. My son accused me of having my priorities twisted, and never let me forget that I recycled before taking him for X-rays. (However, we did not have to drive home later in a car that smelled like a brewery dumpster.) Remember when we switched our incandescent lightbulbs to fluorescents for the sake of the environment? Good times. How simple it was before we learned so much more about the extent of the damage and the enormity of the task ahead if we hope to survive here. We clung to the reassuring belief that recycling the peanut butter jars and switching out the light bulbs would save us. Now that communities are burning up, flooding, blowing away, and collapsing under biblical weather events, the true gravity of the situation has descended. Whole countries have lost the ability to grow food, because they have no healthy arable soil. People are dying. If you are “woke” then you are probably traumatized by a growing understanding of what we’re up against. We have to do so much more than we at first imagined. We must let sleeping fossils lie. Leave the fossil fuels in the ground (as Greta Thunberg says).

This week when the cashier at the natural foods store asked me how I am, I had a new answer ready. “I’m self-righteous because I bought an EV.” His eyes widened. “Like a hybrid?” he asked with satisfying admiration. “Nope. All-electric plug-in that uses no gas whatsoever.” More admiration. Ha! I’ll take it. We generally feel like we can’t make a dent in something as enormous as pending planetary collapse. But we can and we must. After buying my EV, I believe this even more than ever. So I want to share some actions I have taken to show the love for Planet Earth and pass along an inhabitable ecosystem to the young folks. I hope by sharing I will give you some ideas about things you can do too.

Energy. I am fortunate to have a local provider, called Sonoma Clean Power, that provides electricity for my house from 100% geothermal energy. No dinosaurs were harmed in the making of my electricity. Sonoma Clean Power is brought to my region through something called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), which allows local governments to produce their own energy and deliver it through existing power systems. Before Sonoma Clean Power arrived, I bought my electricity through Arcadia Power. If you buy your energy through Arcadia, then your power company must offset all your energy usage with green energy sources. It’s the next best thing to having a true green energy source coming directly to your home. Arcadia serves communities nationwide so you can look on their website to see if it’s available in your area and sign up for it if you like. I swear, if I could wrap my head around physics, I really would build my own windmill. Alas, in the absence of mathematical or scientific aptitude, I’m grateful for CCA. I have an electric on-demand water heater, but I have a gas stove (run on propane). I do have alternative cooking methods with my electric convection oven and one countertop conduction burner recently purchased. In the past I have avoided cooking on electric because I burn everything, but conduction cooking is similar to cooking on gas. I can cook vegetables OK on it. But I tried frying an egg once and burnt it, which must be a message from Planet Earth telling me to stick to a vegan diet. Do you think my conduction burner is channeling the voice of Planet Earth? Maybe I could make some money off that, kind of like seeing the Virgin Mary on my shower curtain.

Transportation. (Did I mention that I bought an EV?!) My EV is perfect for local transportation. I don’t travel out of the area much. I have to put on shoes and comb my hair for that kind of travel. With 100 miles on a charge, my EV will get me anywhere I need to go in the everyday. For long distance driving, I still have my trusty, beloved 2006 Honda Fit, which gets pretty good gas mileage for a fossil eater. Further travel, such as on an airplane, produces massive carbon emissions, and should be used sparingly. So I have cut back on air travel. Although, I must fly to Portland a few times each year to see my grandson. Being a grandmother is a tough job but someone has to do it. My point is that everyone has room to rethink their transportation and travel to reduce carbon emissions. By-the-way, because my EV is charged at home, it is technically run on geothermal since that’s my energy source to charge it. Pretty cool.

Food. This topic has many aspects:  eating, buying, growing, supporting sustainable agriculture, etc. We may not like it, but meat and cheese production is killing the planet so humans should basically go vegan. All the justifications and excuses won’t change the facts. How ironic that our prehistoric ancestors mostly hunted meat for sustenance. Sorry all you paleo dieters, but it’s time to move on beyond Paleolithic. I have tried to convince myself that cheese is not as damaging to the environment as meat because basically I worship in the temple of cheese. Unfortunately, cheese is indeed a problem. God grant me the serenity to accept a meal without cheese, the courage to step slowly away from the cheese, and the wisdom to recognize the fundamental difference between soy-cheese (oxymoron) products and the real deal. For the sake of my grandson and the other children growing up under the specter of climate change, I do my level best to eat mostly vegan. I’m already vegetarian, so that helps. I became vegetarian nearly 50 years ago after reading Diet for a Small Planet. At that time, becoming vegetarian was radical. When I declined the meat loaf, a lot of people thought it meant I was a Communist. I didn’t know any vegetarians. I never imagined that, five decades later, I would move toward vegan. It’s still tough being a visionary. No one invites you in for milk and cookies when you don’t drink milk. A lot of people get their kicks out of making fun of vegans. I do not find this amusing as someone “woke” who is trying to do my part to save the planet. People who eat meat are having their carbon offset by vegans. Be grateful. I have to confess, though, that I still buy chicken and fish for my cat, because you can’t realistically keep a cat alive on hummus.

Another thing that helps is to buy local food as much as possible. I read labels to see where food came from and I shop at the Farmer’s Market. I buy all organic food to support organic farming and consequently sustainable agriculture. As consumer demand for organic food increases, the industry follows by producing more organic food. Trust me on this, you can make change with your fork. I grow some food in my yard. It’s not enough to sustain me, but it’s something. Also, my half-acre yard offsets my carbon footprint because I planted lots of trees and I cultivate healthy soil. Trees, plants, and healthy soil make excellent carbon sinks. The healthier an ecosystem, the more carbon it sequesters. My flowering plants feed birds, bees, butterflies, ladybugs, and other environmentally important insects. Unfortunately, everything loves a healthy garden, so I feed a lot of critters that show up without a bona fide invitation. The wild turkeys wreak havoc; mostly by sitting in my fruit trees for a munch and breaking the upper branches with their weight. Don’t turkeys want to save the planet? What is wrong with them? If you’re struggling to eat vegan, let me suggest that you make an exception for wild turkey meat. This is where gun control gets tricky (but no one can convince me that an automatic weapon is needed to kill a turkey).

Materials. I saw a cartoon in which a man asked a vendor for a plastic bag for a fish he was buying and the vendor replied, “It’s already inside.” Materials choices, especially reducing plastics, poses one of the most frustrating challenges to living a cleaner lifestyle. Why do we need all this packaging? There must be a future Nobel prizewinner out there who can figure out how to breed a wild turkey that craves and digests plastic. Raise your hand if you want to pursue this idea. I try to avoid adding more plastic bags to my household. I buy 100% plant-based storage bags, even though I know they won’t break down in anaerobic landfill. At least they will die some version of an organic death sooner than plastic. I buy many items in bulk and bring my own reused containers to the store for things like nuts and nut butters, honey, flour. So I’m back to washing out the peanut butter jar. I bring reusable cloth produce bags to the store and the Farmer’s Market. I make my own hummus to avoid the plastic tubs that go with store-bought hummus (and because homemade hummus is delicious, despite the opinion of my cat).

Now that I have an electric car, I can go for days, probably weeks, in the warm months (half the year) without using any fossil fuels. But I still have a carbon footprint, particularly in the winter when I use propane to heat the house. I can’t afford to convert the house to a clean heating system and I’m averse to freezing so, yeah, not as sanctimonious as all that, huh? I don’t think my healthy backyard soil sequesters enough carbon to offset my airplane flights to see my children and grandson. But I have found an interesting option for offsetting my carbon footprint. I can pay to offset some of my carbon emissions through the United Nations Carbon Offset Platform. If you want to offset some of your carbon footprint, then check it out. It’s a very cool way to move toward being personally carbon neutral by supporting terrific global projects that protect the environment while really helping people in their everyday lives.

Now that I drive an EV, I feel light. I feel less overwhelmed by the enormity of climate change. Each time I drive my EV past a gas station, I feel empowered. I also feel chastened by the reminder that we have choices and we can take action. “Just do it” is more than a sneaker slogan, my friends. I took the plunge. I just did it. We still have choices. Let’s make good ones. Save the fossils.

(Photo by Ron Reed)