Politics, the environment and electric cars

People often ask me to shut up.

In the past few months the reason has often been that I’m banging on, again, about the American election and how utterly vital it is to the future of the planet.

It’s become problematic in my own home, where my younger child has formed the idea that Donald Trump is actually the President of Australia and that all of our neighbours and friends need to turn out to vote against him.

Politics isn’t just boring for children, it’s confusing, too.

So why do I care about a country in which literally tens of millions of people are ready, willing and excited to vote for a man with no soul and no discernible intelligence who is stealing their money, and their futures, and is willing to sell the US for not even a hill of beans, but a few cans of Goya Beans, as long as he gets paid?

Well, because of those children I mentioned. If Joe Biden wins, the Free World will be lead by someone who believes that “Global warming is an existential threat to humanity,” as he said in this week’s debate.

And that “We have a moral obligation to deal with it.”

If Trump, heaven help us, wins again, our last best chance to do something about emissions, and global warming, and raging fires, and rising seas and boiling temperatures and summers in which it will be too hot to go outside, will be gone.

Instead, we’ll have four more years of someone who claims that: “I know more about wind than you do and it’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds.”

It matters to us, not just because the US is the second-largest polluter in the world, but because it has the economic heft, still, despite the past few years, to change things.

When Obama brought in fuel standards and emissions regulations – which Trump has since dismantled, for no logical reason other than his hatred of Obama – it forced car companies to act.

When California pushes EVs and declares that it will ban the sale of ICE cars by 2035, as the world’s sixth-largest economy, that makes a difference. A big one.

And if Biden does win, he’s made it clear that he will go out there and knock the heads of other countries together.

Countries like ours, where Scott Morrison not only smirks sideways at the idea of climate change, cuddles coal and derided the very idea of EVs at the last election for wanting to “steal our weekends”, but does everything he can to help the fossil-fuel industry.

The government has been “consulting” on fuel-emissions standards since 2015.

Last year, it announced that it would leave our current standards unchanged until 2027, allowing us to continue to sell 91 octane regular unleaded fuel with unacceptably high sulphur levels. Because that’s what the Australian petroleum industry wanted.

We’ve ranted here before, of course, about just how spectacularly little Morrison and Co have done to encourage the take-up of EVs, either via the incentives seen in other countries, and California, or through the rollout of infrastructure. Car company execs have told me, repeatedly, how infuriating and galling they find it that the government won’t even take the subject seriously when they lobby on the issue.

My daughter, who is nine and will remember last summer’s fires as one of her first and most formative experiences – as her grandparents were in harm’s way on the South Coast – is so worried that she wrote to our Prime Minister, with no encouragement from me – I would have told her it was pointless – and begged him to do something about climate change.

Today, we got his response, and her excitement was too cute and lovely for me to pour my cold fury onto. In “his” letter, his careful staffer tells us that he is “very serious” about climate change, and that “Australia is working very hard with other countries to fix this problem”.

He goes on about his Climate Solutions Package and how “It will help reduce emissions, improve energy use in homes and business, and get us ready for electric vehicles.”

When, Scomo? When will we be ready?

Could you perhaps promise my daughter something a little more concrete, like, say, the leaders of China, who have pledged to make 25 percent of that giant country’s car sales EVs by 2025?

I don’t have the heart to tell her that we’re still struggling to reach 1 percent.

So, I will continue to rant, like an old man shouting into the expensive, bird-killing wind. But at least there is some hope. As I write this, my daughter is responding to Mr Morrison, listing some specific measures she thinks he should take to help, the first among which is: “Getting rid of Donald Trump”.