I grew up near Cleveland, Ohio in the 1960's. Growing up then we were awash in the promise of a new era. Exploration of space, amazing strides in science, medicine, technology. The Great Society. The War on Poverty.
We were brought to these opportunities by the tremendous success of the great industries of the previous 100 years.
And yet those remarkable advances had brought problems of their own and Cleveland was a prime example. The steel and coke plants were still a powerful part of the city when I was a kid. I remember my mother used to take me downtown for Christmas shopping. The number of huge department stores was amazing and it let to subversive thoughts in a 4-year-old upon seeing the 5th or 6th Santa Clause of the day.
It was fun but I also dreaded it because the entire downtown seemed to have a permanent stink of sulfur and other fumes from the coke plant and mills. A few years later the river that flowed through town infamously caught fire. And not long after that, our class took a field trip on an excursion boat that actually took passengers on that river. The city views were interesting but the river itself was wretched. The boat, as I recall, was "The Goodtime II". We kids had fun speculating about the fate of "The Goodtime I". Dissolved, was a popular guess. :lol: Cleveland was a mess.
In the midst of the dawning environmental awareness of the late 60's and early 70's I recall reading articles about electric cars, the challenges facing their development and interesting things like regenerative braking.
In my teens I took up bicycling, which became a life-long pursuit and so I've spent decades in the exhaust plumes of countless motor vehicles. After a few million lungfuls it starts to wear on you.
I learned to drive shortly before the oil shocks of the late '70's. The price of gasoline skyrocketed. Not only were the old gas guzzlers dirty but suddenly they were also stupidly expensive. And Mid-east tensions became a staple of the American news diet.
Inexorably we were pulled into conflict there and so we've had years of warfare based on petroleum.
And now it's become plain that the warnings in the '60's that we were ruining the planet, were not hyperbole.
In short, I have a love-hate relationship with petroleum. It has given us great prosperity but it's also been responsible for a lot of the things that have sucked about our world since I was a kid. I'm so tired of it. And I keep hearing the same tired anti-environmental arguments I heard from the old fogies when I was a kid. Same arguments, just new old fogies. We're smarter than this and we have the technology to fix it.
And so when I test-drove the LEAF, my 19-year-old "chaperone" asked me why I was interested in the car. The answer was easy. I'd been waiting for it since I was a kid. Other kids played with Hot Wheels and daydreamed about Corvettes and Camaros. My toy cars had little electric motors and were powered by N-cell batteries.
Did I make clear my WHY yet?
Gasoline sucks. It's dirty from beginning to end. From well to pipeline, to tankers, to refineries, to gas stations, to cars, to exhaust. It's a trail of disgusting filth that ruins and kills at every step with its pollution, spills and wars. It's like a curse and I can't wait to be done with it.
I can't wait for the day when you see gasoline cars mostly in museums and the occasional passing by of an antique car club, sort of like once in awhile you see a line of Model Ts off to some gathering. I can't wait for gasoline to be
nostalgic.
