The Daily: 26 October 2023

This is just a short, mostly small news brief for the week. But first the headline…

Hurricane Otis made landfall over Acapulco, Mexico, yesterday morning. A hurricane in the eastern Pacific, where the coldest ocean waters are constantly upwelling, is singular enough. This is the strongest storm to hit the coast of western Mexico on record, perhaps ever. It made landfall directly centered on a city of 1 million, a travel destination for a certain class of people. Acapulco has since gone dark. The outside world knows there are widespread power outages throughout the city and has seen footage of extensive destruction, but there is ominously little other news.

But Otis is newsworthy in itself, not merely in relation to humans. This storm strengthened from a Category 1, the weakest hurricane, to Category 5, with sustained winds in excess of 165mph, in under 12 hours. Not only is this rapid intensification historic, but, until yesterday, it was an unknown unknown. Humanity, with its best tools and data gathering, had no idea this was possible. And now we do…

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Turning to the small but significant, here is an update on my car. I drive a plug-in hybrid. I don’t have an electric because at purchase time, eight years ago, there were few pure electric cars on the market and all were prohibitively expensive. This has turned out to be fortuitous. An electric car would not meet my needs, or indeed many transportation needs in my part of the world. First, let me say that my hybrid, with its battery bank taking up much of the trunk space, is about 500 pounds heavier than the same make of car with a conventional engine. And my car is small. So there is less room to haul other things, more car to drive, and more energy needed for acceleration — either increasing speed or climbing hills.

I live in central Vermont. Hills are a fact of life. While going downhill does charge the battery, going up can drain it in minutes. Lacking a “speed charging system” in my garage or at work (in a town with no charging stations at all), it takes my car 15-20 minutes to gain a mile of charged transport potential. Three to four miles of potential travel can be dissipated within seconds going up the hill out of my town.

It takes a weekend to achieve full charge because the charging process slows considerably as the battery becomes more charged. It takes an hour for a couple miles on the front end of charging. It can take a day or more to fill up the battery the last couple miles. And “last” is a highly variable quantity.

In the summer, my car had regularly achieved a potential transport charge of 19-20 miles. This is drastically reduced with every degree of cooler temperatures. At 70°F, it will charge freely and get to those top capacities. At 60°F, it rarely gets above 14 miles of charge. At 40°F and lower, which is the temperature in my unheated garage for much of the year, it never charges more than 9 miles, no matter how long it is plugged in. This is less than a round trip to work for me. Even if the terrain were flat, I would need the gas-powered engine to get home.

My choices are to heat the garage — using more energy and probably stressing the small electrical circuit installed in my garage (if it’s possible at all to install a heat pump) — or to rely on the gas engine. I get very good gas mileage, though it might be nearly as good as a lighter car that doesn’t need to haul batteries up steep hills at highway speeds. Or try to find another walkable job — in a community recently devastated by flooding.

This is all to say that electric cars are not the panacea that is portrayed in some circles, though you should absolutely reduce your use of conventional engines. Which probably means localizing your life.

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In a last bit of small news from the dystopia, a business customer in my office was upset because he believed he had been shorted. He said, without any apparent awareness that this was deeply offensive, “Thought you were trying to jew me”.

He was not punched in the face or summarily shown the door. In fact, we could do nothing but gape. He comes in nearly every day…

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So… yeah… that’s been my week… Yours any better?

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023