Unleaded: .73 Gallon

by paradox

A mysterious and baffling element to our cher cousin Republicans, empirically confirmed at Balloon Juice by those who have breathed among them (please feel better soon, John), is a compulsive loathing for energy independence. Seriously, there’s something about the inability to blow people up in the middle east so we can wreck Prince William Sound, our atmosphere and finances that viciously crimps conservative dick, bring up the subject and they get instantly spitting enraged, as if freedom from Saudi oil is a castration to the American psyche and experience.

I remember a George Will column from 19 years ago (now there’s a first-class hack who has so-mercifully faded from all our lives, the fine people at Salon astutely left him off their vastly illuminating list) sneering at Al Gore for even daring to state the vastly dangerous, abhorrently inefficient and stupid internal combustion engine could ever disappear from American life, as if Al Gore had suggested baseball or bikinis should be taken from us. Jimmy Carter, too, engendered a visceral loathing for the fairy idea of energy efficiency, by god bring on the Gipper for global warming and more wars, that’s the America we know and as it should be.

There’s something about the ability to twist or stomp a gas throttle to spew noxious and blatting noise pollution that equates to big-dick righteous American masculinity among our Republican brothers and sisters. [stares blankly] Beats the fuck all outta me how it could be so, for the life of me I do…not…get it, but this vastly regrettable truth all around us is undeniable.

Another total mystery to energy conservation and the conservative tribe is the complete absence of reverence to hoarding cash, believing Jimmy Carter and Al Gore saves money! Where by Darwin is the Republican reverence that market forces of efficiency can deliver dollars of happiness to us all? I am one year out to breaking even from a puny $1,200 attic and wall insulation investment in 2005, in 2012 I am one smiling American son of a bitch as I don’t pay PG & E approximately $30 more a month. Where is the greed, the avarice, the hoary pride of pocketed cash? Beats me.

I’m inordinately fond of my vtech Honda 4-banger, but it just tripped over 100k and is definitely in the first stage of beater, it really should be replaced. I hate buying a new car in its first year of production, but relatively soon the Nissan Leaf will be in my driveway, initial calculations spit out an efficiency rate that equates to fuel cost at .73 a gallon. Way less than a dollar a gallon, no noise or poisonous gasses, man I am so there.

Yet again this plain fact of golden happy nirvana is obscured in the initial reporting of the Leaf from Associated Press, the lead is buried to the core of the earth with a headline the Leaf gets 99 miles to the gallon. Yeah it does, but what in the hell does that equate to in comparative gasoline costs? Approximately .73 a gallon, since edited out of the work.

Calculating range and efficiency for electric cars is extremely difficult, so many possible variables can change that hard factual answers are impossible to give, but every time it’s tried compared to gasoline the answers always spit out extreme savings and cheapness. Why? Because no matter how the algorithm is written, chucking the horribly stupid energy expense of piston to crankshaft to tranny to wheel hub to tire, putting this awful technology into the shitcan of history where it belongs, saves vast amounts of energy and money.

Along with saving our atmosphere and ending the horrors of war enslavement to the middle east. Bye bye internal combustion, fuck you, George Will.

[Electric cars have energy wired right to a superbly efficient motor mounted right on the drive wheel, there is no transmission. There are no gears, resulting in a righteous technology that produces the quickest car in the world, the White Zombie. Keep smiling, Jimmy Carter, I love it too.]

So what if presently most of the electricity is carbon based? Some of it is nuclear, wind and solar sourcing. Not hard to have all the grid running absent of carbon fuels in our lifetimes, not hard at all.

[sigh] I dunno, we seem to like being stuck in our problems in America at the moment, that somehow wars and pollution are our only path forward. However the hell we got here, well, please let our American love of money start one way out, I’ll take it.