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On the Rube Goldberg machine of fossil fuel production
This newsletter from Bill McKibben, from a few months ago (shortly after the US began its illegal war on Iran) makes such a good point. Rube Goldberg’s machines were comically silly, but the tremendous complexity, expense, and risks of the real-world fossil fuel extraction, delivery, and usage systems are deadly serious.
I’ll quote a chunk of it here, but the full details are well worth a few minutes of your time.
If you want a gallon of gas for your car, someone first needs to have drilled for oil—in a few places (Saudi Arabia) this is still relatively easy, but increasingly it means figuring out how to go a mile beneath the surface of the sea, or frack the subsurface geology, which is to say blow it apart. Once you’ve collected your crude, you need to carry it to a port, often through a pipeline that must cross mountain and desert, and there load it on to a giant ship, which must sail the seas. Upon arrival somewhere, it needs to be piped to a refinery, which is among the most complicated pieces of machinery known to man. There it must be separated by heating in a distillation column, so that the light products—gasoline—rise to the top, and heavy products—say, asphalt—sink to the bottom. You use heat and pressure and chemical catalysts to “crack” some of the heavier molecules into lighter, more valuable products, and then you treat what you’ve got to remove impurities like sulfur. You pipe it part of the way to its final destination, and load it into trucks for delivery to gas stations, where it is stored in underground tanks, until someone appears with a credit card to pump it into his vehicle. In the engine of the car it is mixed with air inside a cylinder and compressed; a spark plug fires, forcing a piston to move; this linear motion is converted by a crankshaft into rotational energy to move the car; meanwhile the piston pushes out the burned gases.
The point is that continuing to depend on that dirty, dangerous way of powering our lives, when we can literally get energy freely, cleanly, and quickly from sunlight (and wind) just about anywhere on the planet, is crazy.
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Cleaner air with EVs measured
The focus of cleaner technologies like electric vehicles is usually on reducing greenhouse gases, which is, indeed, super important. But don’t forget that burning stuff for energy also creates plain old dirty, unhealthy air. So when enough people switch away from old-fashioned gas cars in an area, there should be a measurable improvement in air quality, right? The answer is yes, per recent research:
The study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that’s often taken for granted – that EVs don’t just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now.
They correlated California Dept. of Motor Vehicles EV registrations with satellite data showing nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution.
“We’re not even fully there in terms of electrifying, but our research shows that California’s transition to electric vehicles is already making measurable differences in the air we breathe,” said lead author Sandrah Eckel, PhD, an associate professor at the Keck School of Medicine. …They also saw the expected counterexample: neighborhoods that added more gas-powered vehicles experienced increases in pollution. The findings were then replicated using updated ground-level air monitoring data dating back to 2012.
This is why you, me, and everyone should switch to EVs, and why infrastructure like charging stations is worth investing in, and yet another way the Trump administration is undermining public health (by halting the Biden-era EV rebates).
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EVs: huge in Costa Rica
New York Times: These Countries Embrace E.V.s to Avoid Oil Price Shocks
Costa Rica is a leading example of how electric vehicles are rapidly gaining popularity in many less affluent countries that are not part of the giant U.S., European and Chinese auto markets. There are signs that the war in Iran, which has sharply raised the cost of gasoline and diesel, is accelerating this trend.
Electric vehicle sales in Latin America, Africa and much of Asia — a grouping that includes billions of people but that analysts often refer to as “rest of world” — soared 79 percent in March compared with a year earlier, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a research firm. For all of 2025, sales of electric cars in these countries jumped 48 percent.
The article describes growing pains – worries about grid capacity, and some initial struggles with incompatible charging stations – but this is the way forward. These vehicles are just better.
Biusa, a private bus company, is replacing its entire 60-bus fleet with battery-powered models made by King Long, a Chinese brand.
The electric models cost $50,000 more than diesel buses from King Long, but the company can quickly make up the difference by spending less on fuel and maintenance, Miguel Zamora, a Biusa executive, said as he stood near a row of chargers.
The buses easily cover their daily routes on a single charge, he said. Ridership has increased because passengers like the quiet ride and superior air-conditioning.
The buses, Mr. Zamora said, “literally pay for themselves.”
It's high time to go solar