Way Is Clear, But Path Is Not

My friend Jim Taft bought an electric car a couple of years ago.

This was his way of doing what he could for the cause of clean air.

He wanted his public life to resonate with his private concerns about the fate of the earth.

This spring, however, the busy social calendars of his children idled his icon to environmental enlightenment.

“We had a year and a half of good experiences with the electric car,” he explained a few days ago. “But we started running into the limits of its range as our kids became more active.”

Basketball, soccer and two different schools for his sons conspired to drain the batteries and the practicality of the family’s electric car.

“In the wintertime lead acid batteries are a lot less efficient so our range was reduced there,” he said.

He tried to work with the company that manufactured his electricpowered Ford Escort to solve the problem.

But the company has hit rough waters, too.

Nobody answered the phone at the California factory last week when Taft called to inquire about a problem with his vehicle.

“Right now I have a $23,000 paperweight sitting out in the driveway,” he said with a laugh.

Today, the two Taft kids get where they need to go in a used Nissan that burns unleaded gas.

My friend’s experience offers a reminder of the trade-offs, half-steps and lessons learned in any effort to do the right thing and still cope with real life.

It is a lesson important in our day.

It is the reason why we cannot save every salmon, leave every tree uncut, or switch off every nuclear power plant.

Sometimes the price is just too much or the unintended consequence too great.

For example, just as the Tafts were parking their electric car, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh were suggesting this was the environmentally-sound thing to do.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon concluded electric cars can, in fact, reduce smog. But the researchers also found that the emissions from mining, smelting and recycling lead needed to make batteries for large quantities of electric cars (the Tafts’ Escort contains 18 lead-acid batteries) would pose a more serious environmental threat than the smog.

And, in a report published in last week’s Science magazine, the engineers calculated that even a small electric car running on advancedtechnology lead-acid batteries actually pushes six times more lead into the environment than a car powered by old-style leaded gasoline.

This doesn’t suggest, however, that the world shouldn’t listen to and learn from pioneers like the Tafts who go out to the edge and try to live environmentally enlightened and responsible lives.

They are pioneers on a path that eventually we will follow.

On a personal level, my friend’s family provided an instructive, real-life laboratory for alternative energy transportation.

His advice to the next generation of electric car inventors: more range, less recharge time.

There are other lessons, too.

“As a family we learned we had to to do less driving,” my friend said, “and this could be valuable to society if it became a larger part of our culture. Less driving would mean less traffic congestion, more availability of parking spaces, and maybe even a return to a kind of community where the shopping, and banking, and family activities are all close by.”

The world, in fact, would be a cleaner, less congested place if people drove fewer miles, on fewer trips, to closer places. Central cities would be less blighted, the cost of suburban services would be lower, and neighborhoods would be more economically diverse and better connected to one another.

Such a world is worthy of consideration, imagination and inspiration.

But there is also a lesson to be learned by having to balance the inspired with the practical.

My friend has learned that.

The trends of his life at the moment don’t suggest that he will be driving fewer miles in the coming years.

His kids are becoming more active, not less.

Growth patterns in Spokane and Kootenai counties suggest more people will pursue more activities farther from urban centers. This translates into most of us driving more miles to work, to school and to play.

Knowing these realities, my friend has kept thinking about ways he can live an environmentally-enlightened life.

“It’s a complex mix of issues we face,” he said. “I know there is a lot of interest in making an environmentally-friendly car. But I’ve come to think maybe it’s an impossibility because cars, by their nature, tend to expand communities. So, even if you had a wonderful car that didn’t pollute and had a small environment hit, you still could have enormous impacts on the human community in terms of fragmented neighborhoods, separate families, and unknown impacts on watersheds and aquifer regeneration.”

So, my friend is working on other social and environmental issues that he thinks can help the world: habitat preservation, improvement of the public schools, advancing telecommuting and telecommunications.

He remains an idealist.

But even idealists must face facts when the soccer practice is miles away.

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