AN ELECTRIC CAR IN YOUR FUTURE?

Author’s note: Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible to write in a style which is comfortable for me. 

My Dear Trill,

My answer to your question in an unequivical NO. You should not buy an electric car, although you can well afford it. But for you it does not "pencil out,” as they say, for a number of reasons, including cost, but a main one being that your electrical power comes from a coal fired power plant, which would effectively make your electric car a coal burner. 
Granted, electric cars are nice, they run quietly ( be aware that quiet cars are a hazard to pedestrians)  and smoothly and have much improved  acceleration and response over gasoline engine powered cars, but that does not get at the heart of the problem they are reputed to solve -  reducing emissions to help abatement of climate change. Electric cars are at best a regional solution, working nicely where grid power is renewable, such as in Washington State and Western New York and countries like Norway where hydro power is the main source,  and regions where solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear are the main sources.
In this field, greed, ignorance and corporate perfidy converge  to encourage a gullible public that electric cars are the next wave in personal transportation. That may be so, but if ever a new, broadly accepted product presented a case for  systems engineering, covering study and evaluation of resources, infrastructure, short and log term consequences, tradeoffs, and preferable design approaches, this would be it. Such a study should be within the purview of the Department of Transportation, but at present, it doesn’t consider it their responsibility to provide  design guidance to the auto industry, despite the fact that responding  to market forces alone can result in aggravating, instead of  abating the climate change problem.
The reason? Approximately two thirds of electrical power supplied to the grid comes from power plants that are coal fired or natural gas fired. That would imply that two thirds of electric cars would be fossil fuel burners.  A sharp rise in electrical power consumption due to the demand of electric car batteries would mean construction of new power plants. Because they are the lowest cost and can be rapidly built and placed on line, new power plants would  doubtless be fossil fuel burners. 
Thermal efficiencies of such plants range from around thirty per cent for coal plants to around thirty eight percent for natural gas. Electric car efficiencies are around eighty-five per cent, taking into account electric motor and drive train losses..... which would mean an overall electric car thermal efficiency in the mid twenties. In contrast, modern gasoline powered motor cars deliver thermal efficiencies  close to forty per cent. 
Naturally, an electric car salesman will include in his pitch that you will be doing your part to abate global warming. He will point to the rear  of the car and exclaim: “Look, no tail pipe. No emissions.” The truth is that the tailpipe is now the  smokestack adjoining the new fossil fuel burning power plant a few miles down the pike.
A systems engineering study of the entire paradigm shift in transportation would take into account on-board power generation as well as the grid as sources of power, always with the objective of projecting the smallest carbon footprint. Fuel cells fed by natural gas or hydrogen would be candidates. But these are risky, problematic ideas due to the likelihood of springing leaks from road vibration, pot holes, impacts etc. Eventually this will occur. You wouldn’t want to park your car in the garage if there were a hydrogen gas leak and you weren’t aware of it. 
Inevitably, a systems engineering study would examine a technology that has been around for nearly a hundred years -  the Diesel electric locomotive. Apply this technology to the electric car and find ways to produce biodiesel as the fuel of the future, and a near zero carbon footprint electric car will be availabe everywhere. Moreover, it will run dependably when the grid is down for days at a time due to storms. Biodiesel is not a far-fetched idea. California, home to half the electric cars in the U.S., already has about twenty biodiesel stations.
Trill, I hope this gets you thinking further about purchasing an electric car. I would like to buy one too, but a suitable one has not yet arrived upon the scene. 

FIRST DEBATE

Hillary came off well, but the thought of Bill in the White House for as many as eight more years is abhorrent. Will he be her chief advisor? The financial debacle of 2008 can be traced directly to his signing away the Glass Steagall Act which had served the country well since the thirties. A victim of the Machiavallian machinations of Texas Senator Phil Gramm, Bill Clinton opened up the Gates of Hell to the banking industry and Wall Street financiers.
The final cost to taxpayers was $750 B bailout money for too-big-to-fail banks.(borrowed money, so who knows how much?). $750B is enough to pay for the college educations of ten million students. A fearsome prospect….. Bill Clinton residing in the White House for eight more years.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

From the weather scientists to the President to the Pope, a salient topic is climate change. There are deniers, but the evidence is that it is occurring and it will occur at an ever faster pace, due to the nature of positive feedback. (when things get worse, they can get even worse, faster). When the ice melts, the water gets warmer, so the ice melts faster. We, the living, may not see much change in our lifetimes, but succeeding generations will. Mass migrations the likes of which we observe in the present events in Europe, but much larger, will upset everything. The oceans will rise, as they have before and living areas will be inundated
My book of short stories, A Pig In The Rumble Seat (Amazon), contains  stories partly reflective of my career as a rocket engineer, engaged in design and development of the Atlas and Centaur rockets in the World War II Consolidated Aircraft factory in San Diego. I regret not including an experience that has a particular meaning for the present concerns, as it highlights a rare acquaintance with a time in the past when Earth’s oceans covered much more of the planet than they currently do.
About ten miles east of where I live in La Jolla on the Pacific coast, the terrain is similar to photos I have seen of the ocean bottom. Rolling hills and valleys composed of who knows what deposits over the ages. In an area known as Sycamore Canyon, the company, then renamed General Dynamics, hired architects and engineers to design and build facilities for test firing the rockets, comprising steel towers for holding the vehicles, storage tanks for propellents and a blockhouse from which test engineers controlled the firings.
Early in the building process, some of the mounds were scarfed away to provide a level area for operations, leaving other mounds that were sliced off from bottom to top like a cut through a round loaf of bread. Revealed was layer upon layer of shell creatures that had lived out their lives and built up a crust on the ocean floor during an ancient period when the region was covered by water. Using my Swiss Army knife, I pried some samples out which foolishly I never kept. I had at that time no feeling other than that ir was interesting. It was in fact a profoundly spiritual event to be in touch with something that lived a millions of years ago and had been brought into the light.
We now know that there was at least one period in Earth’s history when there was little or no water trapped as ice and the sea level was perhaps two hundred feet higher than it is now. In California, the Gulf of California would have moved significantly northward, an explanation for the seashell deposits in Sycamore Canyon. There was no San Diego. Most of the East Coast, including all of Florida, was under water. Then followed a period when warm oceans produced severe storms, In the polar regions and Greenland the precipitation was heavy snow which turned into enormous ice fields, enough to lower the ocean levels to where it is now.
Could the ice caps melt and raise the ocean level again? The answer is yes, and probably faster than we expect because a new factor augments what might be characterized as a normal, cyclic global warming event. That is the the human factor, whose activities and excesses in burning fossil fuels release annually more than a hundred gigatons of carbon dioxide, a heat trapping gas, into the atmosphere. To make matters worse, and will likely speed up the process, rising temperatures will thaw the perma-frost, which upon decaying, will release vastly more tonnages of heat trapping gases.

So things can get worse, much worse, faster, and probably will. Positive feedback at work.