I will probably curse the summer of 2021 for as long as I continue my annual sojourns around the sun.
Montana rivers are mostly on Hoot Owl restrictions, if not closed altogether. And it’s not just fishing that has suffered. When it’s too hot for trout, it’s usually too hot for humans. The calamity became clear in July, when I traveled from Montana to lower temperatures in Southern California.
Then I ventured to Portland, where the normally temperate Pacific Northwest was doing its best blast-furnace imitation.
I’m a car guy. I love driving. I love sports cars. I love automotive technology. And since I love playing in the outdoors, a suitable four-wheel drive vehicle is a necessity. My current ride, a Ford F-150, is pushing 200,000 miles. This has me pondering my next outdoor fun delivery device.
Climate change means the future is electric. The V-8 engine that powers my truck is an internal combustion engine masterpiece. By the way, get used to the acronym ICE in this automotive context. My ICE is more powerful, more efficient, cleaner burning and more durable than any engine found in the work trucks my father drove for decades.
It’s a technological marvel soon to be a relic.
If I needed to go electric in the next year I’d have some interesting options. Tesla is taking orders for its Cybertruck, due to arrive in 2022. The technology is impressive, but I’m not sure I want to be mistaken for a blade runner when I pull up at a fishing access site. And General Motors is taking orders on an all-electric Hummer, the brand used to be the punch line in excessive consumption humor.
Both are great options, but I’d probably go for the new electric Ford Lightning. I appreciate that it’s styled like a regular truck rather than something out of science fiction. I also like a feature on the Lightning that we’ll all soon come to love: the frunk.
Electric motors are smaller than gasoline engines so the space under hood has been repurposed. The frunk in the Lightning is big enough to hold two sets of golf clubs, or, since it has a drain, it can be filled with ice (not the acronym but frozen water) and your refreshing beverage of choice for pre-kickoff frontgating.
Electric vehicles are superior to their ICE counterparts in almost every way. They are more powerful, require less maintenance, and the absence of a tailpipe is a beautiful thing.
They lack in one department only: the battery. The three vehicles above have ranges of 250-350 miles between charges, and only Tesla has a recharge network that makes road trips feasible.
This will change.
On my way back from Portland, I drove up the former salmon super highway known as the Columbia River. This river basin — reaching all the way to Hungry Horse Reservoir — generates more than 40% of U.S. hydroelectric generation, or 29 gigawatts of carbon free power.
There’s the rub. While those dams produce plenty of clean energy, they obliterated fisheries that fed people, bears, and transferred tons of biomass from the fertile Pacific Ocean to the relatively sterile mountain streams of the Northern Rockies.
Electric vehicles aren’t a miracle climate cure. The process of creating those automobiles also creates a lot of carbon, and if they are running off electricity generated by coal-fired power plants, are anything but carbon neutral. There will be tradeoffs in the form of dams, wind farms and, I suspect, more nuclear power.
Without drastic action, however, we’ll never reverse the build up of heat-retaining carbon in the atmosphere of the planet that is the only home human beings may ever know.
I consider the Lightning in my future to be the starting line, rather than the finish.