10 Girls and Oil That Doesn’t Run Out

When I started my research for this post, I had a direction I wanted to go, a clear thesis statement that I was going to prove. I was going to tell you how the carbon tax was a good idea, better than not doing anything. But the more I researched, the more my mind started to change, and not because some politician somewhere else had another opinion about it. To me, it didn’t feel like we were doing enough at this crucial stage in the crisis. If we were decades away from the so-called tipping point of environmental catastrophe I could say, Okay, let’s try that! But we are not decades away. Some would say we have even passed the tipping point already, and that it might all be too late. Either way, since we don’t have the leisure of time, drastic changes beyond conservative thinking need to take place. Now is the time to act!

What we need is a comprehensive, non-partisan response to climate change that does not pander to corporate greed, and the status quo, simply to make ourselves feel good through the small, painless efforts we are taking. We will need to work for the common good. We will need to put our money toward renewable energy sources. Human thriving will have to supersede making a profit, or we are doomed before we even try. The common good can no longer be relegated to a “socialist” idea. It must be seen as a human right and goal. We must move beyond political name-calling and see a future for people and planet as a shared, united goal of all leadership. It might take the courage of every living human to right the course of our future. And the common good might even hurt. In fact, it must hurt. Otherwise, I think we are just fooling ourselves, if we don’t recognize that we are in a climate free-fall, the consequences of which have yet to play out to their fullest, gravest extent.

The problem with political conservatism is that it lacks imagination and the political will for change. It is absolutely fear-based, and a kind of hoarding. Since it cannot imagine what it has not yet known, it sits and does nothing. To this mindset, change is seen as a foreign enemy to be suspected, with the Opportunities quadrant of the SWOT analysis good and empty.  Unless all the ducks are in a row, they do not attempt risk, they do not venture out to change.

Likewise, this hesitancy can be found in the average person too. Change IS difficult and some people welcome very little of it in their lives. I like to think I am willing to take some risks, for better or worse, having reinvented myself over and over with the decisions I have made. And one of the most profound risks has been looking at my own impact on the environment, primarily in the form of the car I drive.

In the Fall of 2021, my husband and I took a risk and traded in our Honda Civic (which I loved to drive, by the way), putting our money where our values were, and purchased an Electric Vehicle, a 2021 Hyundai Kona. Full disclosure, we weren’t intending to buy right then and there. Having watched Long Way Up, Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s electric motorcycle venture from the tip of Argentina to Los Angeles and watching the production team fight the odds in their electric vehicles, I was interested in the towing capacity of EVs. I was looking forward to a lifestyle that included some short-term travel that an RV could afford. Unfortunately, the towing capacity of EV vehicles was not what I had hoped, but the stage had been set for us to buy anyway, so we took the plunge.

Now, I am not going to sugar-coat it and say that the EV has been everything I dreamed it to be. It has on occasion been quite inconvenient. In the summertime, its range is around 422 kms. Our first real test came in the winter of 2022 when we drove up to a cottage on Manitoulin Island. During the summer months there is a ferry that takes you from the mainland at Tobermory, Ontario to the southern tip of the island at South Baymouth. And while it isn’t any faster, you do save on mileage than you would driving all around Georgian Bay. In the winter, of course, we did not have the luxury of the ferry: we had to go the long way round. The clincher is we had to make sure that we charged up before we got onto the island, because there was not a single EV charger on the entire island[1]. If memory serves correctly, we would have charged in Espanola before heading south towards Little Current, a pretty little town at the mouth of the north shore of Lake Huron, and the first stop on the island.

By the time we arrived at the cottage, tired, and in the dark, I believe we had less than 60 kms charge left on the vehicle. Without charging up by plugging in at the cottage we wouldn’t have made it off the island going the same way we had come, since it was a good hour and twenty minutes back to Espanola. We had a plug in the car that we brought along specifically for charging, so we plugged in as soon as we arrived, leaving it to charge overnight. By morning, we noticed the cord had melted the snow where it had lain and not charged adequately. We were concerned that we were creating a kind of fire hazard. Thankfully, the small town of Gore Bay was just a five-minute drive away. At a hardware store that is also a grocer, we picked up a heavy duty, 25-foot extension cord, and resumed our charging in a safer manner. Remember when I said the common good was going to hurt? Well, it does. And that was only the beginning of the inconvenience we would experience.  

In the summer of 2022, we had planned to visit our friends at their cottage on Falcon Lake in Manitoba, but my husband had come down with Covid-19 and at the time would have needed to be clear of infection for 10 days to fly. So, I got on a plane, and he drove our EV across northern Ontario with our dog, stopping every 200-300 kms to charge the battery. Needing to cover approximately 2300 kms, it would equate to a full day’s worth of charging. In other words, it would take him a day longer than a gas-powered vehicle to travel the same distance. He did arrive safely with the dog (who normally doesn’t travel five minutes without showing his verbal displeasure) and we resumed our normal revelry with our friends at the lake.

When it was time to go back home, I decided to cancel my flight and head back home with the boys in the EV. Everything started out okay. We had driven into Winnipeg the night before to stay at our friends’ condo, a further hour and a half going in the wrong direction from home. We left early, getting up at 4 am to have a full days’ worth of sunlight. I wasn’t keen on being in moose country once the sun went down, so the sooner we got on the road the better.

We had made good time by the time we arrived in Kenora, but when we got to the Petro-Canada EV charging station that my husband had used a mere few days earlier, we found that it was under water and inoperable. And all the other chargers that the app indicated were also out of use. We were hooped. We did not have enough of a charge to make it to Dryden, the next major centre on our route. So, we drove around, using up our charge like it was gold we were throwing out the window.

One of us had the idea to go to the Hyundai dealership: Surely the manufacturers of the car we had would have an EV charger on site! But alas, they did not have a charger, nor did they know anyone who would. There were a few dealerships in a row, and we asked at all of them. No one knew where we could get a charge. Until someone did. One man said he thought there was a charger down by the waterfront near the amphitheatre. It was our only shot. So, off we went, spewing gold into the wind. Thankfully, the man was right. There was a charger near the water, and it was in working order and not in use by anyone else. Our trip was now back on track. Except almost four hours had gone by. We were way behind schedule. And we didn’t know what other hiccups we would encounter before the day was over. We had hoped to make it to Wawa before nightfall, but that would no longer be possible.

The rest of the first leg of our trip was mostly uneventful, until we got to Thunder Bay. We had some charging trouble there too and lost about another hour before we were charging up. So, the biggest problem with our EV adventure was that time and sunlight were against us. Not to mention fatigue. Having gotten up at 4 am, the long distances were getting the best of me. Finally, about 17 hours after leaving Winnipeg, we arrived in Terrace Bay. For the last two hours of the trip, I had a wicked migraine headache that was making me nauseous. In the motel room, I was so ill that when I bent into the sink to wash my face, it felt as if the floor beneath me was moving. You can say that the romanticism of owning an EV had more than worn off that day: it was completely eroded.

Sure, I know you might say that we made the leap too early in buying our electric vehicle. Some of you will even believe I am a poor spokesperson for the whole EV manifesto, forming a weak argument at best for its cause. You might say there needs to be more infrastructure in place before you would ever take the leap yourselves. And you might have a point. But then again, if you don’t take risks, nothing ever changes. Sometimes you really need to be the change you want to see. It will be inconvenient. But I would rather live like this than wait for all my ducks to be in row. I would rather be forward-thinking than reactionary.

Again, when I think of the reluctance for change, that conservative mindset, I can’t help but be reminded of a biblical story. It’s called a parable because it uses everyday imagery to teach a lesson. And it goes like this: Ten girls were on their way to a wedding. Five of them were wise and five of them were foolish. The foolish girls took only their lamps without any oil, so when it was time to meet the groom, they asked the wise girls if they could borrow some of theirs. The wise girls said there wouldn’t be enough for all of them if they shared but told the foolish girls they could go into town to buy oil now if they wanted. By the time the foolish girls got back, the wedding had started, and the wise girls had already been invited inside for the feast. The door was now closed to anyone who arrived late, and the foolish girls were locked out.

So, there you have it. Buying the EV feels like I’ve got oil in my lamp. I am not waiting for the perfect situation to make the leap. I made the change when it wasn’t convenient. And three years from now, we will trade in that car for another one. In the years that will have transpired, there will be better technology and better battery charge than when we started. But that doesn’t mean we should have waited. We did what we could with the knowledge, money, and technology available at the time. Because doing something is always better than doing nothing and waiting for everyone and everything else around us to change first.

But circling back to the start of this article, governments and business will need do much better. They will need to have the courage to come up with a better game plan that looks well into the future, all the while acknowledging that if left unchecked, we will continue to use and use more and more of our resources. We must have bold goals in place that could include taxation, not just cutting taxes in other sectors but using the monies to invest in clean technology, to invest in the future, not only short-term payoffs.

The carbon tax is a mere stopgap in the mitigation of climate change, and its effectiveness seems to be negligible at best.[1] We will need a more comprehensive approach at all levels of government and the political will (courage) to match. If we exempt certain sectors, we must have a clear why and a clear when. If they get a break now, is it so they can innovate and eventually be subject to the same rules as everyone else? Are we remediating toward a value that is no longer relevant? What happens when population increases, and our energy use goes up? The models seem to be a few steps behind, inadequate to deal with new data.

We need a better way. A better kind of capitalism. Or something altogether different. If one government stripe does one thing for four years, we shouldn’t spend the next four undoing what they’ve done because we don’t like their striping, because it wasn’t our party’s idea. The world we live in is non-partisan. We have created these artificial constructs, and they don’t bring us together, they keep us separated. We need to see the climate issue as a humanity problem not a political problem.

Our society needs to be about more than profit. There must be a social element to what we do. We have a moral duty to one another. We are in this together. All of us. The haves and the have-nots. People, plants, and beasts. We are in that free-fall toward environmental catastrophe whether we immediately feel its impact or not. Burying our heads in the sand doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around us, it just means we might have forgotten to bring the oil.    

Sources:

https://aegis-hedging.com/insights/california-quebec-carbon-cap-and-trade-report-august-2023
https://www.bccic.ca/bc-carbon-tax/
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/carbon-pricing-in-canada-what-it-is-what-it-costs-and-why-you-get-a-rebate-1.6627245
https://ecofiscal.ca/carbon-pricing-works/
https://institute.smartprosperity.ca/content/just-facts-please-true-story-how-bc-s-carbon-tax-working
https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/failings-of-californias-cap-and-trade-programme-revealed-in-new-analysis/
https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-pricing
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-california-cap-revealed-analysis.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140988322002201

[1] According to Google Maps, there does now appear to be a Flo Charging Station at Little Current.

[2] I researched both British Columbia’s Carbon Tax as well as California’s Cap and Trade with the Government of Quebec. Neither of the systems seem to adequately address the ever-increasing nature of the beast that is fossil-fuel use. In the case of BC, the modest reductions in supposed use (5-15%) have been offset by an increase in use over time, making the short-term gain no longer relevant. Likewise, the data is old at this point, since BC’s Carbon Tax was put into place in 2008. With current data missing, it is difficult to see the residual effectiveness of the original venture.