2020 Make a change
Today marks the beginning of 2020, plus neatly ties into the end of my first quarter of EV ownership.
This was heralded by my quarterly bill from Origin Energy (punctual, if nothing else) for the princely sum of $2.65. Seems the PV panels on our roof have managed to drive our EV for over 2700Km in the same period, plus power our house/pool/aircon. It struck me as a fairly reasonable figure....even though we exported about 120Kw back to the grid more than we consumed.
Rather than pay like a heroin addict to dealers like British Petroleum, Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron for a weekly hit of automotive fuel, plus government coffers an obscene fuel excise and GST to burn fossil fuels and further bugger up the only planet we have, we now pay effectively nothing.
In Australia that's a rare decision (I have seen just one other Tesla model 3 in the Shire, and a hand full of S/Y variants). Only 1% or so of new vehicle sales are currently EV's. In Norway it is 60% and climbing. Norway’s 25% sales tax was removed from new EV purchases in 2001, and drivers were permitted to use bus lanes from 2005 and do not have to road pay toll fees. They actually want ICE powered vehicles off their roads as soon as possible. Fancy that. Really progressive and effective policy.
Australian EV buyers are offered zero incentives, still pay tolls, and have to pay about $7000 luxury car tax to support a car industry that no longer exists. It gets better, as the notion that EV drivers who do not pay fuel tax, should instead pay a road tax has already been floated. This duplicity and hypocrisy beggars belief.
My hope for 2020 is also that for the literally thousands of Aussies who have become de-facto refugees due the tragic bushfires over the last few days, that a few may ask: WTF?!
These fires had been modelled and predicted four decades earlier in a paper published in 1988 “Australian bushfire danger under changing climatic regimes” by Dr Thomas Beer (CSIRO). Yet the warnings went unheeded. Is this disconnect between Australians and what has proved to be excellent science, simply driven by ignorance or by greed? Perhaps both. In any event it was ignored by the likes of Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison. Oh...and the people who voted for them.
If the events of the summer of 2019/20 do not cause some to also actively pursue their local MP and Federal MP's and ask: why are you still approving coal mines? Why is there no thermal solar grid power? What are you doing to incentivise EV's? What will it take?
So...my NYE 2020 resolution is to get into the face of my MP's.
I am going to write to them. And really annoy them.
My hope is other IIS members might do so as well. Happy New Year!
|