When Will We Learn?

Our lack of support for EVs is just one small way we're failing on climate action.

Charging our car at a Level 3 public charger.

When my father died on December 17, we weren’t expecting it. My sister, who lives closer to our parents, had gone on a short vacation to Cuba. Her husband was out of town visiting his mother. And I’d been driving around without bothering to fully charge our car, a Chevy Bolt.

Suddenly, I was making way more trips than usual from my home in Oakland to San Rafael, where my family lives. The day my sister came home early from Cuba and I picked her up at the airport, took her home, and then drove back to my house after going to see my mother in San Rafael earlier that day, I drove over 100 miles.

The predicament of public charging

That wouldn’t have been an issue if the car had been charged; we can drive well over 200 miles on a full charge. But I didn’t have enough juice. Our car displays the range of mileage remaining, because actual mileage depends on how you drive, whether it’s cold out, if you use heating or air conditioning, and whether you climb a lot of hills. If I’m concerned about the miles remaining, I go by the minimum estimate to be safe. I didn’t have enough for that particular day, and I didn’t have time to charge using our usual method.

Rafael and I don’t commute to work and we don’t leave the house nearly as often as we should, so we rely on what’s known as Level 1 charging — plugging our car into a regular electrical outlet via a special cable. It’s very, very slow; charging this way can take 40–50 hours or more to go from empty to 80%. But it avoids paying for a Level 2 charger, which you need to have installed. Because we park our car far from our electrical panel, that would involve running lots of conduit, and the whole thing would cost thousands of dollars.

A neighbor kindly let me use her Level 2 charger, which can charge your car from empty to 80% in 4–10 hours, but after a couple hours I still didn’t feel like I had quite enough.

No problem, I thought, I’ll find a nearby public charging station to speed things up. A Bank of America a few blocks from us has three chargers. I’d never tried them before, but the app said one was available:

But as I arrived, another car pulled into the one available spot before me. It turned out to be a woman who’d never used a public charger before, and I helped her connect her car. Well, at least I helped someone. The cars at the other two chargers didn’t seem close to leaving, so I decided to try another location. A Whole Foods near us has chargers; I could buy myself lunch while charging, so I’d have something to eat when I got to my mom’s.

Again, the app for that network (a different one from the previous chargers, requiring a separate app) said a charger was available. Again, someone else had arrived just before I did.

I drove to another Whole Foods. The same thing happened.

Half an hour later, I finally ended up back at the B of A and was able to charge enough to be confident I could do my day’s driving.

It doesn’t have to be this hard

My frustrating experience was in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the top regions in the country for EVs. If it’s this hard to charge a car here, you can imagine what other places are like.

When Rafael and I undertook an EV road trip from Oakland to Albuquerque a couple years ago, we got a taste of the sorry state of public charging. But I thought things would be better by now.

They’re not. At least, not enough to notice. And that isn’t helping electric car adoption.

In 2021, the Biden administration set a goal of 50% of new vehicle sales being EVs by 2030. While the numbers are going up, we were at only 6.8% in May 2024.

It’s true that we could soon reach a tipping point that shoots the numbers up more quickly, as Tony Seba, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and educator, shows in the first few minutes of this video:

He likes to point out that in the 1900 Easter parade in New York City, you could see one car on 5th Avenue among the many horse-drawn carriages, and by 1913, that was reversed. After thousands of years of relying on horses for transportation, we switched to cars in just 13 years.

One car on the left; one horse on the right.

The same could happen for EVs — if we make it easier to charge them, among other things.

The Biden administration does have plans for that as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including one to install EV chargers every 50 miles along interstate highways. Who knows what will happen now, but by the time the administration changes, the money should be allocated to projects and states. Just last Friday the administration awarded another $635 million to continue the buildout, and they claim we’re on track to achieve the goal of 500,000 public EV chargers by 2030. We’re up to 206,000 now, compared to 47,000 a couple years ago.

You wouldn’t know it from my Bay Area experience.

But at least I can usually charge at home, as most EV drivers do. Most apartment and condo dwellers, though, have nowhere to charge at home; here in Oakland, many houses don’t have garages or even driveways. To increase EV adoption, we need many more public chargers.

We also need faster-charging batteries with longer ranges, which are on the way — someday. Oh, but wait, a lot of the advances are being made in China, and we don’t want to import cars from there.

Far beyond EVs

Of course, EVs are just one small piece of the puzzle.

It turns out that around 40% of global shipping is dedicated to moving fossil fuels around the world so they can be burned somewhere else. Much of this dirty fuel is used for transportation, which causes 28% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. So we need more EVs, for sure. But we should be emphasizing solutions beyond them, like biking and public transit. One of the things I miss about my visits to Barcelona and Paris this fall is their amazing subway systems. The Netherlands became a bike culture despite the horrible weather because of government support, including investments in protected lanes and massive bike parking. Paris has recently been following suit.

We don’t like doing non-car-centric stuff like that in the U.S. But small pockets show how well it can work. Davis, California, is a bike mecca, with bike lanes nearly as wide as streets. The jury is still out on New York’s new congestion pricing, but it may be getting more people on public transit. Cities that experiment with car-free streets generally find there’s a lot of initial opposition, but once they’re in place, people and businesses love them.

There’s so much more we can do to clean up our transportation. There’s so much more we can do when it comes to manufacturing our goods, powering our buildings, growing our food. Why aren’t we doing it?

When the horror shows become routine

There’s a continuing disconnect between the climate emergency we’re in and the meager actions we’re taking. That disconnect goes far beyond my EV charging woes, but they’re emblematic of our inability to take bold climate action. I thought we’d woken up to the dangers of climate change when Katrina happened. We hadn’t. Then, I thought surely Superstorm Sandy would get us to take action. It didn’t. More recently, it’s been the flooding in “climate haven” Asheville, North Carolina. And now, the LA fires.

Folks, the future is now. We’re in it. When I see the apocalyptic scenes of the LA fires, I can’t help but wonder if Rafael and I should move out of California. This could be us. But where would we go? No place is safe anymore. Even if there were such a place, moving somewhere safe while the rest of the world implodes is not a solution.

It’s getting to me — especially the convergence of the fires with an incoming administration that lacks compassion and denies climate change.

We can’t afford not to take action, as writer

Joshua Ellis

put it so eloquently in this tweet:

We can’t afford to let these horror shows become routine, as Jennifer Rubin warned we’re doing in a recent Washington Post opinion piece (right before she resigned from that rag).

And yet, they are becoming routine. I agree with Sammy Roth of the LA Times: the latest disaster won’t change anything. It’s been nearly 20 years since An Inconvenient Truth, and the inconvenience is still outweighing any other concerns. When will we learn?