The Price Of Progress

.. And Clean Air

So I'm (as you may have gathered from past posts) entirely for EVs - but NOW please not some unspecified time in the future when we've killed the planet - and if someone was to offer me even a cheap tiny EV to give away my petrol car, I'd do it in a heartbeat. 

There's this growing eagerness to start turning charging stations into money-earning civic features and it's good that companies are taking the plunge and planning them. And as far as making them into features, they really need to get their sh*t together and actually plan the damn things to cover their costs. Because of two reasons. I'll get to the more important one in a second. For the moment let's stick to actually making money from them.

First, they don't exactly have a consistent brand like petrol stations do. If I saw an "AGL'N'Go" or "Red-E Recharge" or "Origin Outlets" anywhere I'd not think of EV charging. If I saw:

Solar panels?

that sign I might think solar panels or off grid but not a place to charge my mobility scooter. You?

But How Does It Earn?

By that I mean, how does it make money? The whole selling point of EVs when you come down to it is that you get further on your dollar because electricity's cheap. You get X number of vehicles past your SuperDuperStupiCharger every day because Y number of people have to drive past doing Z miles going about their day. 

In the good ole days, they'd pay S (for shitloads) dollars for petrol. But nowadays, they're still doing the same Z miles but the cost per mile has to come down significantly or they'll actually plan their travels and charge at home or find a cheaper charging station. 

So how do you as the SuperDuperStupiCharger station make money? It takes time to recharge, sure. But not enough for you to show them a full-length movie or serve them a full cooked grill.  That takes longer, they'd have to be asked to shift their vehicle as soon as it's charged so you can get the next one connected - it's all not gonna happen is it? ("WTFSM? I have to get up from this mixed grill, move the car, then come back to a cold plate someone's probably spat in while I was outside? Take that whole idea and shove it!")

Similarly, if you put your SuperDuperStupiCharger in a shopping mall, the other shops will love you but they probably won't pay your bills. And you'll have cars at the charger bays taking up the space and the owners of it using the opportunity of free parking to go for a long shopping trip in the mall ort a full tailored suit fitting or whatever. So that'll get cars in, but you won't get the turnover you need to cover rent. 

You should figure on a presence time of 15-20 minutes per customer. Nor will you get full occupancy all day every day. So what can you offer that will bring in more income? 

I was thinking about that as I read the latter half of the article. An attendant and a lounge? And make your money how exactly? But my idea is fairly simple. What can I do in 15 minutes? I can phone a friend. That's not going to put dollars in the till. I can order a Quarter Pounder meal. But that just feeds the McD's franchise, as otherwise you'd have to build a burger joint of your own. But vending machines? Now THERE'S a thought!

Make a small sheltered area and absolutely line the walls with vending machines. Nothing too high value, but think thirst, hunger, boredom. And Japan has some of the world's best vending machine ideas. You can have a pizza cooked for you in that time, or a rice or noodle bowl meal, a pasta dish, desserts. In addition to the inevitable salty snacks and chocolate bars and ten varieties of soft drinks. 

NOW an attendant makes sense, to clear rubbish and patrol for people with coat hangers. Because vending machines are a relatively low cost investment, you've already got megawatts of electricity to the place, and the conventional vending machine sales companies will come and fill their machines for you. The others if you own outright you can fill them yourself or have a company that looks after them. And suddenly your SuperDuperStupiCharger is looking a bit healthier in the bank account. 

But you'll need to hurry, or have a lot of future planning in mind...

That Inconvenient Second Part

Don't forget that the SuperDuperStupiChargers you're installing will become almost obsolete in fairly short order. You have maybe ten - maybe only five - years to recoup costs before your SuperDuperStupiCharger station becomes a monument to Ancient Tech. Trust me on this. Cars are already charging faster, going further on a charge, and the trend is going to be to a car that will go for a month between recharges, probably using a totally different battery chemistry. 

So you really need a plan for that contingency. Yes, people with older EVs will still be driving them in ten years' time, but there'll be fewer and fewer of them. At that point you need other things to bring people in the door, and that's where good planning would pay off. I can't help much with that. But as people increasingly go to longer-duration vehicles, There's also a trend towards bikes and micro-lease vehicle shares, there's a thing to try. As time rolls on, add a section for short-term hire of bikes, scooters, mobility/shopping scooters, and personal EVs.

So know that it's a time-limited opportunity but it's also time to carpe the hell out of that diem and get into something like this. If you come up with a franchise idea from this, do remember me hey? 

Before I go, here's a recent article about how well we're doing at getting off the fossil fuel tiddy. The answer is "way too slowly." But theses things all tie together. Bear with me.

Getting Away From Fossils

If you read the article, it was at a dinner party in May 2022 where a point was raised that with a Labor government and so many green-leaning parties holding a lot of the voting power in the government, we were sure to get to our crap reduction targets much faster. And yes, that's true. But also not.

See, there's a balance. The LNP was on that balance right out there with the big corporations and industrial complexes and cartels wanting to just basically suck the planet dry for the sake of a fictional form of wealth called "money." 

That's basically the neoliberal, free-market, capitalist, right wing platform wherever you find them on the planet. Take the planet away from the hoi polloi one shovelful at a time, turn it into money, take that money away from the hoi polloi to render them powerless and easier to kill when the time comes to get rid of dead weight, and then live happily ever after with all your equally rapacious brethren.

Until they figure out that you actually have some of that wealth and want it for themselves . . . 

Okay okay - they don't literally think their actions are murdering fellow human beings. They're not THAT bad, after all. No, the people who die in poverty deserve it because they're from a sub-human species known as "the hoi polloi," the poor people who obviously woudn't know a trust fund if they tripped over it because their parents could never afford one for them. 

And THAT last paragraph says it all. The hoi polloi is the mule, the animal, the noble savage that's nevertheless a savage and not really human like US. 

Also - don't think the Rapacious aren't as human as you and I are - it doesn't take much to tip a person from slave to the person with their boot on the neck of a slave. I'm deliberately using quite emotive and controversial terminology here because I can't stress this enough. We're all capable of it. We just need to realise it's a losing game even when you think you're winning.

There are a few truths out there. Yes, the planet will recover, with or without us. But I know which one of those scenarios I prefer . . .  And you know, there are signs that this will happen. Take this blog post - I'm one voice that may have been a bit lonesome 20-30 years ago but I've seen the exact same hyperbolic curve in the coverage, frequency, and insistence of the science and calls for action to shut fossil fuel down as we see with every other thing that goes mainstream viral. 

The thing is that while (as the Georgia Guidestones were at great pains to tell us) the Earth probably would be in "perfect balance" at just half a billion humans in population, that isn't going to happen willingly. Is it? But part of the upsurging interest in climate change has resulted in "quiet quitting" parenthood as I pointed out a few weeks ago.

Here are a few thoughts on this, though. I'm going to start with the fact that much of life has some inbuilt triggers that we don't see until the triggering event. No-one suspected that grasshoppers can be triggered by overpopulation or a particularly fruitful season into becoming locusts. 

Biologist John Calhoun made mouse habitats that became famous. For all the wrong reasons. I won't go into the details but there are parallels that could be drawn. Also, overpopulation triggers may be far more subtle than swarming or becoming sociopathic psychopaths. (Although... Hmmm...)

Let's not get to this stage...

I think we do have a trigger and it's been triggered, but the reasons aren't simple. Mouse Hells were small microcosms where it was easy to see that the population was crowded. But open the space up and those pressures reduce and the triggering stops. 

Similarly we may possibly have environments that trigger Mouse Hell behaviours in some large and densely-populated cities around the planet, but of course the planet isn't one big city. What has changed is that we dug up a lot of the planet and turned it into machines to make other machines and then - Internet. I've noticed how much more aware of our "global village" and the different parts and people of it the Internet made me even after just a few years (before the 2000s even) of chatting, swapping photos of local happenings, watching videos people made. 

So this has coincided with the rise in climate awareness, ecological awareness, and the trend to quietly deciding not to continue the skyrocketing population trend. 

And another factor that's contributing to this population decrease is that we've mucked the planet up too much in the meantime - lead and PFAS pollution is now pandemic around the entire globe, and between that and the many many MANY food additives we've been exposed to, chemicals in textiles and paints and the machinery we drive and use and operate, in our houses - they've all combined to contribute to a very noticeable and marked decline in fertility.

So our population will reduce quite sharply anyway. But what we are going to have to fight for is that the Rapacious aren't the ones to enforce it by selecting who goes and who stays. The Rapacious Right are also xenophobic and intolerant and their idea of this would be genocide, and we need the genetic diversity. The age-old drive to maintain OUR particular DNA and OUR particular genotype is probably not going to be the best survival strategy. A shallow gene pool is never good for survival. 

So the two things that really really need to break are capitalism and money. And I think the reason AI is getting such a bollocking is that it's actually the way to break those two things, because once you have (and we WILL have, because again, we are experiencing an upswing in awareness and we're pushing the change to sustainable energy) cheap/free energy you can recycle enough material to make manufacture anything. You can even mechanise the production. 

To make this happen needs us all to get involved. It's not even difficult. Become an armchair activist. Write the occasional email to your local MP or Minister for Whatever. When you're chatting to friends, involve them in a conversation about climate change; clean energy; capitalism; universal basic income, or what-have-you. Become THAT person. Send them the URL to this article, or other articles about these sorts of topics. Help me defray costs so that I can perhaps even hire a search engine specialist that can get more views on these pages. Get my newsletter and get all my news in one email every Friday. Chat to me on Mastodon.

Just don't let the RR have an easy time of it - Keep The Bastards Honest! And don't let our planet become like this: