Monthly Archives: April 2020

A Gift of Clean Air: Let’s Move to EVs in the Post-COVID-19 World

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HImalayas

The Himalayas are visible in India for the first time in 30 years.

I have spent the last seven weeks working from home—sheltering in place to avoid catching or spreading COVID-19.

As I’ve stayed home, the world has suffered greatly, and people have gotten sick and died. That’s very upsetting. But one thing has improved substantially–air quality. From a sparklingly clear Los Angeles to India, where the Himalayas are visible for the first time in 30 years (see above), it’s been an exciting peek at what we can do if we set our minds to it. We need to get through this crisis now, but for the future, we must reduce our CO2 levels significantly–by 50 percent in the next 10 years and be carbon neutral by 2050. EVs and sustainably-generated power are a big part of that solution.

With that in mind, I have decided, after 28 years of automotive testing and writing, that I will now test and review only pure, all-electric vehicles. It completes the move away from testing gasoline-only cars that I made after my Climate Reality Leadership Training in August of 2018.

On April 20th, I published my last two reviews of cars with gasoline engines in them, in Clean Fleet Report. Please go there for the details on the Lexus RX 450hL hybrid crossover and the Hyundai Ioniq plug-in hybrid sedan. Both nice–neither full electric.

As I mentioned in that story, I believe that in the post-COVID-19 world, we will need to continue to find alternatives to driving and cleaner ways to move around. Public transit will likely take a while to feel safe again, especially before a COVID-19 vaccine is found and administered. More people may discover they like working at home, and their companies may find it’s a good arrangement for them, too. Carsharing and ridesharing services will rebound when they seem safe, too. In cities, we need more bicycle-friendly roads and infrastructure. And as automakers bring out more pure EVs and the charging infrastructure is built out, we must move away from hybrids and PHEVs entirely–maybe even from cars themselves.

Although I will be testing, reviewing, and writing about only all-electric cars, there are still many hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles that are better for the environment than gasoline-only vehicles. If an EV won’t work for you (and they don’t yet, for everyone), please consider them over a gas-only vehicle. But if you can drive an EV–do it!

Let’s keep those skies blue.

In 2020, Every Day Is Earth Day

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By Steve Schaefer

Earth-Day-lowres

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. I’ve been hearing about it for months, and, like most people, was preparing to go out and celebrate. With our current COVID-19-induced state of social distancing and staying at home, much of the festivity has moved online, but still, I’m not that excited.

You’d expect that as a trained Climate Reality Leader who spent three inspiring days in Los Angeles with Al Gore in August of 2018, I’d be thrilled at this milestone. But it’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that in 2020, every day has to be Earth Day. And what’s really a shame is that if we had taken what we learned on April 22, 1970 and done more together to fix the problem in the 20th century, we wouldn’t be in the dilemma we are in today.

I was around for the first Earth Day. As a high school senior, I was a little aware of issues like smog in LA and rivers in Ohio that were catching fire. My teachers made sure I read Silent Spring, or at least knew who Rachel Carson was and what she was talking about.

The sixties were a decade of protest, starting with civil rights marches in the south and later in the decade, many young people protested the Vietnam war with huge marches and peaceful demonstrations.

What many people may not know today is that Earth Day was conceived as a giant “teach-in,” where on college campuses across the country, students and other interested people would learn about what was then called “ecology”—the beginning of the climate action movement. We were worried about air and water pollution, and the effects of DDT. We read about the overpopulation problem. We read about powerful oil and coal companies ruining the natural environment. We were worried about the loss of species.

I heard about Earth Day at school, and I recall someone handing out black armbands to wear. I also remember my shame when the mean tough kid made me take mine off in my conservative Scottsdale, Arizona high school. I moved back to California a month later.

What came from this “Woodstock” of climate events was a need and desire in many people—including me — to start caring for the Earth. Earth Day focused attention on our environmental predicament. Many of the climate organizations we know today come out of that time.

Last year, I read The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, by Adam Rome (on my Kindle app, of course). Read it and you’ll learn a lot about how this unprecedented event, starting with a great idea from Wisconsin Senator and environmentalist Gaylord Nelson, expanded without a central blueprint to flower in many different ways in thousands of locations.

Commemorating the start of something is worthwhile, I guess. We celebrate the birth of the United States on the Fourth of July—Independence Day. We celebrate our birthdays and our wedding anniversaries. We commemorate sad things, too, like the death of a hero or events like September 11, 2001 or Pearl Harbor.

But in the case of Earth Day, we have to think, “Has it been 50 years already?” We are so behind now that we can’t just commemorate a holiday, buy a cool t-shirt, and move on. We have to be working on climate action every single day—we don’t have time to waste. If we truly take action, then maybe on the 60th Anniversary of Earth Day, if we’ve dropped our CO2 emissions by 50%, updated our electrical grid and EV charging network, taken natural gas out of many of our homes and buildings (especially all new ones), and done lots of other things to clean up our act, then we can raise a glass and toast the event. And then the next day, get back to work!

Happy Earth Day.