During Bill McKibben’s book tour for Maybe One (1998), an argument for having no more than one child, he gave a reading in Berkeley. I attended, and asked a question: Jane Jacobs says the problem isn’t too many people, the problem is the undone work. (Which I also said at the end of The Shangri-La Diet.) For example, air pollution. The solution won’t be fewer people, it will be cars that pollute less. I asked McKibben what he thought of this. He said he thought highly of Jacobs, but the EV1 was a failure. Terrible answer, I thought.
Yesterday I spoke to the owner of an electric car. It is entirely powered by electricity from solar panels on the roof of her house. It can’t go on the highway but is perfectly good for taking her and her two children around town. She’s had it about a year; she bought it after seeing someone else drive one. Leaving aside the cost of the solar panels, driving costs her almost nothing, is very quiet, and produces no pollution. The car was made in Vancouver. In America, it’s small; it wouldn’t be small in Japan. Looks like the future, I thought.
Green Motors, a Berkeley store specializing in electric cars, started by the man she bought it from. Lovely website, his enthusiasm shines through. Car-maker difficulties.
What is really fun is seeing compressed air used as the storage device for energy rather than batteries or gas tanks. Works very well with the minicars, and has little disposal problems