We on the cusp of a massive, world-wide, economic change. Already clean energy employs a million or more people. Ironically, even oil companies have started to diversify and are buying into wind and solar energy farms. Countries dependant on oil revenue, whose entire well-being has been the result of huge oil reserves, are now heavily invested in green energy. This is wonderful, this is fantastic. But there is more to the story.

 

Come with me for moment and dream…

 

Let’s imagine a world of electric vehicles. Not a single gas guzzler among them. And you’re stuck in a traffic jam. Nothing is moving. You open your window and what do you hear? Nothing. Or perhaps a bird is singing a bright song in the distance. What do you smell? Beautiful, fresh air.

 

Not a single engine is running. When an electric car is stopped, the motor stops entirely, it expends no energy. None of your hard-earned money is being used to keep an incredibly inefficient, non-productive, internal combustion engine running. There’s no horrible exhaust stinking up the air, shortening your lifespan, heating up our planet. You don’t have to listen to the farting of a badly tuned vehicle, you don’t have to listen to the low rumble of endless engines – all busy destroying our planet. You don’t have to spend the next hour checking your fuel gage wondering if you’re going to run out of gas before you can fuel-up.

 

Image that you never have to line-up at a gas station again. Imagine that each night, when you come home, you plug your car into the charger and the next morning you hop in and away you go. Imagine that your car has solar panels built into it and while it sits in the office parking lot for eight hours it’s charging the battery. Imagine that every time you drive, when you put your foot on the brake, the electric motor charges the batteries.

 

In this dream, when you open your electric car window… the natural world floods in.

 

What a wonderful life that would be!

 

And it’s coming. There’s no stopping it.

 

It’s up to us to decide how quickly it’s going to happen.

 

All the best,

 

PG.

 

Internal combustion engine facts:

These engines are very inefficient – only twenty to fifty percent of the energy expended goes to moving your vehicle. When you spend one hundred dollars on gas, at the very best, fifty of that is wasted but as much as eighty dollars could be squandered. When you’re stuck in a traffic jam, all of it is worthless. And for many of us, this is happening every week. So, you throw away between $2,600 and $4,160 per year. That’s a lot of money that you could have used on something else – like a brand new electric car.

Internal combustion engines are very complicated. An internal combustion vehicle has around 2000 moving parts. An electric car has… 20. A lot less can go wrong in an electric car. So, your maintenance costs drop dramatically. Already there’s talk that, with improvements in battery design, an electric car could last you a lifetime – a million miles of driving or more.