Hindsight

 Recently it occurred to me, not for the first time, that it is a ridiculous shame that I cannot afford an electric car. My commute is almost exclusively done on a bicycle, so it's not like I am shirking my responsibility completely here, and the car we do own is a hybrid. But occasionally my wife and I are taking a drive in our fossil-fuel assisted automobile to the local burger joint to further the mess that was created long before I got here. And I am not doing everything I can do to clean it up. 

We have solar panels on our roof, but we have a gas stove. To combat this oversight, we use our electric toaster oven for as many meals as we can. But our gas furnace is what we rely on to heat the house in which we live, so quite often we can be found huddled together on the couch, wearing sweatshirts trying to hold out until we can see our breath in the living room before we turn up the thermostat. 

Okay. That last one might be a bit of an exaggeration, but here I am, sitting at my keyboard with my hoodie on. Because it's April. And it's California. If the past few months have taught me anything, it's that climate change is real and if only the generations before me had considered the outcome of such pipe dreams as "two cars in every garage," maybe things would have been different if they had been electric cars. 

One of the first cars designed by Porsche was an electric car. Just a little factoid that floats around the metaverse of what might have been. It was unleashed on the public back in 1898. This was some fifty years after the Industrial Revolution, the tail end of the Victorian era, It would still be another ten years before Henry Ford's Model T became the mass-produced norm for personal transit. It should be noted again here that Mister Ford worked for Edison Illuminating Company before setting out on his own after the turn of the century. At that time, the chief concerns with electric cars were much the same as they are today: battery life and range. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, internal combustion engines were being refined and tested, burning a refined petroleum product that came to be known as "gasoline." In 1903, Thomas Edison wrote, Electricity is the thing. There are no whirring and grinding gears with their numerous levers to confuse. There is not that almost terrifying uncertain throb and whirr of the powerful combustion engine. There is no water circulating system to get out of order—no dangerous and evil-smelling gasoline and no noise."

So, what happened to Tom's vision? In a word: Texas. Why bother working to refine battery power when the Lone Star State was sitting on enough crude oil to keep everyone's tank full for years to come. By 1935, electric cars were all but extinct. Until the son of a South African real estate developer started throwing money at a car manufacturer named for a rival to Thomas Edison, Tesla. And the polar ice caps melted. And species went extinct. And sea levels began to rise. 

And the climate began to change. 

I wish I would have bought an electric car instead of a Vega back in 1979.