Planet Earth Needs You

By Michael Coppola and Nancy Williams Many people ask me questions about my new all-electric Vehicle, a Ford Mustang Mach-E. They stop me in parking lots, at the beach, or even on the road! This is a breakdown of the main points of owning and operating an EV and the impact I believe this market will have on Climate Change. One of the first concerns I hear is about charging the battery and the car’s miles of range. Charging both at home and on the road has worked out well, however an understanding of the battery technology currently being used will help keep your EV running at its best. It's really no different than knowing what keeps your ICEV running its best. All batteries are degraded by heat, both by an external heat source and self-generated heat from charging and discharging. Just like your cellphone, you must protect your car’s battery from overheating. What that means for an owner is deciding how you charge to protect the battery while achieving the results you require for ...

  Senators Slotkin and Moreno are the sponsors of the "Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026" an act that essentially prevents the importation of Chinese cars and components by US consumers. Both Senators expressed the concern that certain Chinese cars are "connected vehicles" that can collect travel and road information which will be use by China in nefarious ways against the US. On the economic side, they point out that the Chinese government subsidizes these cars, which allows them to unfairly sell for less than American cars. They are also concerned that these Chinese cars have already capture a large portion of the European and Asian market.  Are we to believe the Chinese did not think to build this surveillance capability into the Apple iPhone, smart watches, computers and tablets that travel with us? Software for tracking the location of a cellphone has been available for years and has been used by parents to track the location of their children.  Auto insur...

  The Data Center will be the straw that breaks the back of the effort to stop climate change. They will consume massive amounts of energy, resources and degrade local environments. It will start with their construction and escalate with its operations. Data centers may well be needed in the future but building them at this critical time is not possible, when the reduction in greenhouse gases is necessary for the survival of all life as we know it today. What follows are the reasons it is not possible at this time.   Hundreds of data centers are under construction and hundreds more are being planned. Huge amounts of greenhouse gases will be produced in the making of the steel and concrete for the buildings. Significant amounts of materials and energy will be used to make the massive number of computers and thus will produce more greenhouse gases. During the construction, transportation of men and materials will burn lots of fuel and add to the carbon footprint of the project. ...

Ever since the Trump administration began its effort to stop the growth of Battery Electric Vehicles, BEV's, online articles pop-up every other day either declaring the end of BEV production in the USA or announcing the billions of dollars lost by the legacy automotive companies invested in BEV's. These articles claim the US auto industry has finally heard from the consumer and it is telling the industry they just do not want battery electric vehicles, BEV's. The articles keep reporting that the projected growth of BEV sales prior to the elimination of government tax subsidies will not be achieved. Hidden in the articles is that growth is still increasing but just not as high as before Trump's attack on the BEV business.  So why are consumers still buying BEV?  Reliability of BEV is much better than ICEV. This is made possible because the number of parts, especially moving parts, is many times less than that of an ICEV. It results in lower repair and maintenance cost. O...

Is new development really good for your community? Are there limits to what your local community can support? Have we reached the point where further development results in a decrease in the quality of life for the majority of its residents? With the planet heating up faster than predicted and the effects of the global increase in temperature occurring faster and more severely a more thorough look at further development of our local community would seem  necessary.  Severe rain events that last longer and bring many inches of rain in a very short time are occurring much more frequently and causing extensive damage to local communities. Wildfires that destroy our homes and send smoke that keeps us in our homes, with windows and doors sealed tight so we are not made sick by breathing them. Droughts that destroy crops and grazing fields result in higher priced food for us. More hurricanes with stronger winds staying long and reaching further inland are destroying our local commun...

  By Nancy Williams and Michael Coppola The tobacco industry touted the filtered cigarette as being safer than their unfiltered brands in order to keep selling cigarettes, but the filtered cigarette was not actually safer. Now we see similar misinformation from the auto industry, backed by the powerful fossil fuel industry that the Hybrid Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle [HICEV] is less polluting than the Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle [ICEV] and, therefore, it can get us to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement of staying below a 2 degree C increase or hopefully below a 1.5 degree C increase. How much time do we have left to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement? According to all sources we cannot meet the 1.5 goal by 2030 as required and are headed to exceeding 2.0 C by the mid 2030’s if we continue on our current path. However, it is still possible to halt warming to 2.0 C if we were to immediately dramatically reduce our greenhouse emissions. The latest data shows ...