Month: August 2023

I saw a shooting star last night.

There used to be magic in the night sky. For thousands of years, people invented legends about the night sky. The stars formed pictures. The dark side of the moon was unknown and dark.

When I was little, we would sit on the front porch in the summer and wonder about the night sky. My grandmother would look for the Soviet satellite sputnik.

Starkle starkle little twink, who the hell you are I think. I don’t know the rest of the words.

The moon is made of green cheese. The Man in the Moon. How did he get such huge acne scars? Maybe the moon is hollow. That’s why we have to make the moon a nuke free zone. Maybe the moon is a huge ball of dust and to walk on the moon is to sink into the dust.

VISTA Volunteers In Service To America. These photos – of poverty and hunger – were taken in the same country as the country that took these photos – of the moon. It’s a commercial I remember more than 50 years later. There was no money for decent health care. There was no money for food. There was no money for decent shelter. There were unlimited funds for a cold war race to the moon.

Then, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong forever banished the magic. The moon is solid. The moon is made of the same stuff as the earth. The dark side of the moon isn’t always dark and we know what it looks like. The acne scars were caused by meteors crashing into the moon.

Stars don’t shoot. Meteors float around in space. When the earth passes through an area of meteors, some of the meteors burn up into the atmosphere. The light lasts a few seconds and then the meteor is burnt up.

We have knowledge. Lots and lots of knowledge. Each bit of knowledge destroys a bit of magic.

I miss the magic. That’s why I didn’t see a meteor, I saw a shooting star.

That’s why I painted a green cheese moon.

My grandmother was a diehard republican. According to my grandmother, there was never a bad republican nor a good democrat. She would invent stupid reasons for not voting for democrats – like refusing to vote for Michael Dukaksis because he was too short to be president.

When I was little, it was my grandmother’s mission to raise a good, republican granddaughter. One day, she showed me the front page of the newspaper, pointed to a photo of Eisenhower, and asked me who that was. “Krushchev!” said I. She gave up.

Only once did she agree with a democrat – Truman dropping nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese citizens.

Only once did she criticize a republican – she was furious that Bush I went to Hirohito’s funeral.

Even as a little kid, I knew dropping nuclear weapons on people was morally wrong. Mine is the first generation to grow up with The Bomb. I had nightmares about dropping hydrogen bombs and burning skeletons.

78 years ago today, the United States committed the despicable act of dripping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Rather than repent, we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Rather than repent, we built more bombs and tested them above ground thereby poisoning land, water, animals and people.

Today is the 78th anniversary of our national shame.

What bothers me about the push towards total electricity is politicians overlook so much. 

We have to mine stuff for batteries. How do we do that without horrible pollution and poison water? At the moment, we’re poising pristine small islands and countries to get the stuff we need for batteries. Just because we aren’t living with the damage we’re causing doesn’t mean there’s no damage. Just because the damage isn’t happening in the US doesn’t mean it’s okay to damage other places. If you want an idea of how much damage mining does, take a look at West Virginia. Read about the Buffalo Creek disaster. Read about blowing off mountain tops to mine coal. Look at Pennsylvania where you own the surface of land but not what’s underneath. Why is that a problem? Because the coal companies mine under your house, and you are SOL if the mine caves in and what’s left of your house is a mile below the surface. There’s quite a bit of case law on subsidence and every time the courts sided with the coal companies. 

Batteries don’t live forever. What do we do with the dead batteries? 

Electricity doesn’t grow on trees. How are we going to generate all this extra electricity? We’ve got an electric grid that can’t handle electric use now. 

Exchange gas appliances for electric. What are we going to do with all the dead appliances? Why should I spend money to replace perfectly good appliances? I had the 21-year-old a/c units replaced only because the ones we had were close to dead. I have a perfectly good gas dryer and perfectly good gas stove. I’ll replace them when they die but not before. 

It takes 30-40 minutes to fully charge an electric car at a charging station. And what am I supposed to do for that 30-40 minutes? Worse, what am I supposed to do while I wait for the people ahead of me to charge their cars? 

This business about saving gas money is false. Electricity isn’t free.

 Plug the car in at home? Great. Wait 10-12 hours for the car to charge. Yes, you can buy home charging stations. That’s not an option for me. We’d have to run a special electric line 10 miles from Las Cruces to Dona Ana. That’s a major expense because the electric company charges by the foot for the line and the installation. The electricity still isn’t free. 

Electric vehicles don’t have much of a rang unless the car is a sub-compact. NM has a whole lot of middle of nowhere and very few charging stations. While I’ve always looked for great gas mileage and am content to drive a small car, I also need something practical. Brady has to ride in a crate and that crate won’t fit in the Mini. It barely fits in the Elantra. When I have to use a walker, I have to drag it with me when I go somewhere. Getting the walker in and out of the trunk of the Elantra is a fight. I never thought I’d buy something the size of the Santa Fe, but I need a vehicle that size. The electric Santa Fe – which cost $10K more than what I paid for my Santa Fe  – has a range of 30 miles. My 2021 Santa Fe has the same gas mileage as my 2016 Elantra. Plus, we only buy a new car when the car we have is dead. The Camry lived for 17 years and had 280k+ miles on it when it became too expensive and impractical to fix.  We don’t sell the old car when we get a new one. We send the old car to the junk yard. 

Why are we letting oil companies frack the crap out of the Permian Basin if we’re pushing to go total electric? Why are we letting oil companies put in more and more wells in the Permian Basin if we’re pushing to go total electric? If we care about climate change, why are we letting oil companies release way more methane than allowed? More to the point, why are we letting them release any methane? 

I’ve lived in a total electric house. It’s unbelievably expensive. In Lockport, we had one bill for gas and electric and our total electric house had zoned heating – a thermostat for each room. Even with solar panels on the house, it was too expensive to have a warm house. How expensive? I’ve never had an electric bill here that was as high as what we paid in Lockport and I’m living in a house twice the size of what we had in Lockport.  When we put in a ceramic log burning gas stove, our bill dropped $150. And the stove had only been in for about half of the billing cycle. We installed it in February – the coldest month of the winter. The high temp is about 10 degrees and there’s a 60 mph wind blowing across a frozen Lake Erie. The lake typically has 200 square miles of ice in the winter. Instead of a cold house, the gas stove let me have a warm house. Electricity is only cheap if you don’t use any. And where did that electricity come from? A brand new coal fired generating station that’s now obsolete and offline.

Cold weather drains batteries at an incredibly fast rate. Anyone who has ever done outdoor photography in the winter knows that. And it doesn’t have to get all that cold before the batteries drain at warp speed. Rapid draining starts at about 35F. Those electric vehicles are close to useless in the north east for about 6 months out of the year. 

My issue isn’t with electricity. My issue is with not thinking through what’s needed and how we get what’s needed and what we do with the dead batteries. 

A better approach would be to push for hybrid vehicles. Less gas used, but no need to wonder where the nearest charging station is or to be stuck with a travel range of 30 miles. A better approach is to push for solar electricity. Make it so solar panels are affordable. We did get a price for solar panels on our house, but it was horribly expensive, more than $20K. Solar panel companies regularly go out of business and then you’re stuck with a system that can’t be fixed if it breaks. And they do break. Been there, done that. Refuse to issue any more drilling permits and permanently revoke every drilling permit for any oil company that releases more than the allowable amount of methane.