Power To The People

That electric car that makes us feel so smug. My son loves the acceleration. It jumps when you say "go." It glides through traffic with the ease given, in part, by the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes that would be more rightfully won by a minivan fully loaded with soccer and lacrosse players and equipment. Using electricity gives us the quiet assurance that we have high occupancy of some sort that can be best measured in that smugness. These vehicles were made by pixies under the bright blue skies of Smyrna, Tennessee. Fabricated and built from pure sunshine and good wishes, these cars that make our world a better place. We should be pleased and happy to be motoring about, sneering at those "hybrid" cars. The ones sporting those ugly tailpipes and adding to the problem and not the solution.
Which brings me to the anecdote. It comes from the world of fast food, but like so many of my anecdotes, it packs a lesson neatly inside: Standing at the counter of the Arby's, I obsequiously await the order of the somewhat corpulent customer who stares past me to the menu board above my head. "I'll have a Super Roast Beef, two orders of potato cakes, a cherry turnover and a large diet Pepsi." What I never said in response: "Way to go, Spanky! Take that lifestyle bull by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. Sure, the powdered sugar and water frosting alone on that turnover might be enough to stop your heart, but I'm almost certain that your choice of beverage will be the thing that saves you. Clinical studies show that diet Pepsi will actually cause you to lose weight, since not unlike celery the act of sucking it up the straw burns more calories than can be found in its carbonated content, and by choosing the tub-sized delivery system, you're almost assured of walking out of here today a thinner and more shapely version of the super-size one that walked in the door just a few moments ago."
Electric cars? Same thing. They make them in factories. And the electricity that we pour into them isn't coming from the wind turbine in the back yard. A very clever guy with a very clever name, Elon Musk, has suggested that the cars all of us drive currently will be illegal in his vision of the future. Robot driven cars will replace the ones we drive ourselves, which will be made in factories run by robots. The same factories that will be making those solar panels that will generate the electricity and smugness necessary to human life on this planet in the future. Those factories which have no waste or poisonous emissions of any sort, unless you count unicorns and rainbows as dangerous.
Where's my diet Pepsi?