lately, lots of them. Joined a car club after we lost the old trooper and I’ve been riding around in different EVs and hybrids. They’re great but the EVs cost too much and I can’t see how we’ll dig the lithium out of the ground to build enough of them. Maybe another tech will win out? Pics of lithium mining send a shudder, there’s a cost in any breakthrough – often or always to the scarred Earth and the animals that live on it. And I see the modular nuclear pitch and remember worries I had twenty years ago that we’d end up with a grid of reactors every fifty miles across the UK. I don’t have much faith in capitalism saving us. Capitalism is about wanting more. And what will power the machines designed to suck the offending gasses out of the ether? The only answer that rings true to me in a gut sense is to do less, buy less, go less, ask for less and eat less. Anti-capitalism. I get the feeling that a lot of the people working closely in the field think it’s already too late for reductions, the capture idea is the only way out. And massive lifestyle changes. Then I read the excitement from airport bosses about the thousands of planned, restarted Atlantic flights in coming months. And the morning roads are packed. People want cars, why shouldn’t they want cars? The EV promise begins to feel like a fob off to me, telling people they can still have a car when we don’t have the tech or resources for hundreds of millions of EVs. But I’ve tried without a car and it’s a hassle with a family, you have to plan well and spend more time on travel in the business of living. It’s easier with a car. So we got an old one, one that already exists and we’ll try to keep it going as long as we can. I’ll drive to my croft and live off a pan of fresh-caught mackerel. I’ll patch my jeans and spend all my spare time in the poetry books. I’ll try to learn again how precious energy is – both the spraylet of exploding gasoline and the synaptic spark.