The same sentiments cross my mind as I reflect on the results of E. Jean Carroll’s case against Donald Trump. In the legal equivalent of a New York minute – less than three hours of deliberations – a Manhattan jury held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Perhaps just as important: For the first time in his narcistic, bigotry-promoting, insurrection-igniting existence, Donald Trump has been held accountable.
Women and the justice system, two forces he’s spent his life thumbing his nose at (or worse, far worse) ushered in this accountability.
The $5 million fine awarded to Carroll can’t begin to compensate for the lifelong trauma Trump triggered through his sexual abuse. That trauma continued throughout the trial, as his lawyer’s brutish cross-examination featured such wince-worthy questions as asking her why she didn’t scream while being raped.
None of this is to cast Carroll as a victim. She braved the attacks. She showed what she’s made of. And without judging other women for whatever tough choices they make under such trying circumstances, she won simply by standing up to this spoiled brat of a man.
Explicitly supported by other witnesses who are women, implicitly so by countless others (as well as men) across the country and the world, Carroll withstood the waves of insults and threats from Trump and his supporters.
In fact, in the other significant trial outcome, Trump was also held accountable for the first time for his cruel barbs against women, in terms of his being found liable for defaming Carroll.
Analogously insulted, the justice system stood its ground against a man whose porcine personality reflects how accustomed he’s been to having his way with it.
Yet Again
Marcos comes to mind yet again at this moment. Just as Trump has done for decades, he manipulated the law throughout his life. This stretched back to evading a murder rap while still a law student, partly because the court considered him such a promising young man. Throughout his dictatorship, he operated under a veneer of legality, so that his defenders (not least the U.S. government) could argue that whatever he did – rampant corruption, atrocious human rights abuses – was not really his fault, or not so bad, or justified to combat a communist insurgency.
Until this week, Trump had been similarly successful in twisting the justice system to his desires. Through intimidation, delay, drowning opponents in litigation costs and many other tricks, he’d ruined lives, drained savings and scammed a variety of victims. He consistently got away with figurative murder.
True, he’d paid some prices at the margins. For instance, a court forced him to dismantle the Trump Foundation, one of his countless con jobs through which he helped himself rather than others. He was impeached twice, though never convicted. Thus, he never was brought to account in any fundamental sense.
Until now.
In addition to whining about his supposed victimization, Trump will brag that he wasn’t found liable for rape. He’ll seek to paper over the reality that sexual abuse constitutes forcible sexual contact without the victim’s consent.
So, rape or not, that reality is repugnant. Sexual Abuser is now his own scarlet letter.
Does This Make Any Difference?
As my old law school Torts professor used to ask, Is this a difference that makes a difference?
When applied to the verdict, the question makes sense for all sorts of reasons. After all…
There was the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump boasted that he could get away with grabbing women by their private parts against their will, employing (be forewarned) some very lewd language:
A month after the tape’s October 2016 release, he won the presidency, making many wonder whether he could get away with anything without paying a price. In addition…
The Republican Party’s leadership will likely continue to kowtow to him. The Republican base will probably continue to speak, see and hear no evil about its Feckless Leader. And…
A week is a short time in politics. Eighteen months until the 2024 presidential election is immeasurably longer. Other trials, scandals and events could make the Carroll case seem like a distant memory. Plus…
Those other, potentially more salient events could include the state of the economy, overseas crises, whether Joe Biden comes across as feeble or forceful on the campaign trail and matters we can’t even start to foresee.
What This Is All About
So why is this trial and verdict such a big deal? Especially if Republicans continue to rally around this flagrant abuser of women and all civilized norms?
Because it’s not about Trump’s lackeys and cultists.
It’s about us – that is, folks who value democracy over demagoguery and the rule of law over mob rule.
Seeing this scoundrel brought to some semblance of justice reminds us that he can be beaten, and not just in an election he refuses to concede. And though other issues could loom larger in next year’s presidential campaign, don’t underestimate the reality that the contest may well be won at the margins, by a relatively small swing of votes. Which in turn means that its outcome could be swayed by the lingering stink of this – say it again – proven sexual abuser.
His 2016 electoral success, despite the Access Hollywood video, may suggest otherwise. But a potential array of prosecutions of Trump could add to the weight of the Carroll verdict. And sometimes a specific, verified instance of abuse, as in Carroll’s case, can move the public – or at least the small slice that can determine even a presidential election’s outcome – more than a justified flood of trials or the Access Hollywood video’s more generalized misogyny.
Picking apart the particular is an art that Trump himself has mastered. He singles out an opponent’s alleged violation (as in the Hillary Clinton email “scandal”) such that it matters to the media and public more than his hundreds of misdeeds.
All of this brings us to Trump’s biggest trick. It’s not simply to convince his cultists of his appeal. It’s to demoralize his opponents. To cast doubt on the very viability of our institutions, our democracy, our justice system. To make us despair over the rot he’s promoted and revealed in our country.
A victory like the Carroll trial reaffirms that the rot is not irredeemable. That the rat can’t always wriggle through legal loopholes. That he can’t buy or bulldoze his way out of all accountability.
The impact of this trial, then, is not mainly about how it might affect Trump’s chances of securing the Republican nomination. It’s about what the verdict achieves against injustice, for women and for all of us battling this would-be despot’s desperate attempt to drown our democracy.
Because, for the first time, in the broadest sense of who we are…
[Note from BenIndy contributor Nathalie Christian: For a variety of reasons, the Washington Post article reposted here does not include the original’s full complement of excellent photos. If you subscribe to WaPo I recommend you read the article there. Non-subscribers may encounter a paywall. –N.C.]
City planners targeted a Black community for heavy pollution. Can the damage be undone?
West Oakland and the East Bay just after sunset on July 10, 2022. The I-880 freeway can be seen looping around the West Oakland area before winding toward the Port of Oakland. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Washington Post, by Darryl Fears and John Muyskins, May 7, 2023
OAKLAND —Proud but beleaguered, West Oakland is easy to spot on a map.
This Black enclave — not far from the stately Bay Bridge and just downslope from the mansions of the East Bay hills — is sandwiched by three major freeways. Each day, the trucks and cars that travel these concrete corridors spew toxic pollution into yards and homes, where roughly 45,000 people live.
West Oakland is an example of how government leaders purposely deployed infrastructure to disenfranchise people of color. Starting in the 1940s, urban planners deliberately located heavy industry and truck corridors around the area’s historically black neighborhoods, according to a sitting city planner and documents reviewed by The Washington Post, along with federal and state documents.
Sheng Thao, the city’s new mayor, said it is well known that West Oakland residents were the victims of discriminatory planning.
“They definitely bore the brunt of thoughtless, damaging and absolutely racist policy decisions that were made by previous city leaders and economic interests over the course of decades,” said Thao, who campaigned on a social justice platform and was elected last November. “And we are still dealing with the fallout.”
The city is now attempting to undo that damage. Last year, Oakland announced a general plan update that, for the first time, makes environmental justice a top priority in the planning of future development. In March, the city started taking public comment on those proposed EJ policies, which are aimed at reducing pollution and increasing opportunities in West Oakland and other neglected neighborhoods.
Thao said the city is also taking action on the ground, moving two West Oakland recyclers out of the neighborhood, working with the Port of Oakland to reduce truck idling, and seeking funding to plant thousands of trees in areas afflicted by pollution and a lack of shade.
Despite these efforts, it will take many, many years to address the damage of past decades, local environmental justice advocates have said.
“Ships, trains, cargo handling equipment, trucks are now all concentrated in one place,” said Margaret Gordon, a longtime community activist and founding member of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. Residents in West Oakland continue to bear a burden, she said, because they “have the most vulnerability, the most impact.”
Margaret Gordon grew up in the three neighborhoods that make up what is considered to be the “Toxic Triangle,” consisting of West Oakland, Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, and North Richmond. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
The freeway segregation of Oakland was consistent with the U.S. government’s playbook of that era. The Federal Housing Administration prescribed building roads and other infrastructure to separate White communities from “inharmonious racial groups.”
“A high speed traffic artery or a wide parkway may prevent the expansion of inharmonious uses to a location on the opposite side of the street,” the FHA’s guiding underwriting document advised in 1938, “When a neighborhood is developed with “good housing practices,” the document said, it would be protected “from adverse influences.”
On top of that guidance, a group of all-White city leaders and state transportation officials designed the freeways of Oakland to prioritize the safety of White neighborhoods.
These planners allowed diesel trucks to freely use Interstate-880 — which runs near majority Black West Oakland — but they banned diesel trucks from a stretch of Interstate-580 that runs past the East Hills and the city of San Leandro, which were nearly 99 percent White at the time.
“The intentional planning of these uses … was historically racist,” said Jonathan Fearn, who sits on the Oakland Planning Commission. “The planning profession has to reconcile that because they have been complicit in this whole issue, not only in Oakland, but in cities all across the country.”
But West Oakland is hardly the Bay Area’s only example of blatant segregation and environmental inequity. Two other areas — Richmond, Oakland’s neighbor to the north, and Hunters Point, a neighborhood a few miles southwest in San Francisco — join it in forming a triangle of pollution in a region that has long touted its progressive credentials.
Richmond is where Black southerners fleeing Jim Crow segregation flocked to take jobs in the shipping industry during World War II. Oil and gas refineries and a large shipping port, where mountains of coal are exported, dominate the landscape.
Hunters Point housed a former Navy shipyard storing ships that participated in nuclear tests. The soil is deeply saturated with radiation, uranium and other deadly chemicals near where Black, Latino and Asian residents live.
While many communities nationwide bear a disproportionate burden of toxic contamination, in the Bay Area, the environmental injustices stand out. Residents of Richmond, Hunters Point and West Oakland cope with a legacy of pollution amid some of the most affluent and desirable real estate in North America.
‘All my kids have asthma’
On a Monday afternoon with a pretty blue sky, Gordon carefully prepared her apartment to entertain guests.
She played jazz and opened the windows to catch a light breeze coming east from the bay. But by throwing open the windows, Gordon also invited an unwanted visitor into her home.
It looked like a coating of dust atop a lamp hanging in Gordon’s kitchen. “It ain’t dust,” she said. “It’s diesel particulates. It’s dark because of the diesel particulate matter.”
Her white walls were also dark near the ceiling. “You see that gray line up there? That gray line is diesel particulates,” Gordon said, from 2.5 million freeway truck trips per year.
When she was younger, Gordon hopped on a three-step ladder to clean the residue. Now, she said, “I’m not getting on too many ladders at 75 years old. I know better than that.”
Fine particulate matter is dangerous, health officials warn. When exposed to it, people can be stricken byasthma, bronchitis, emphysema, heart disease and stroke. “All my kids have allergies and asthma,” Gordon said, “myself too.”
Emergency room visits for asthma in West Oakland are76 percent higher than the county average, according to the Alameda County Health Department. Hospitalizations are more than 85 percent higher, and death from heart disease is nearly 35 percent higher.
Emissions from heavy-duty trucks alone result “in the largest contribution to the overall potential cancer risk levels in the West Oakland community,” a California Air Resources Board study said in 2008.
When all the pollution sources are added, the “estimated lifetime potential cancer risk for residents of West Oakland … is about 1,200 excess cancers per million,” the study said.
CARB has since taken aggressive steps to reduce pollution and lower the risk of poor health and death. But health officials and activists say the substantial buildup of pollution continues to take a toll, six decades later.
The Port of Oakland sits at the edge of the West Oakland residential neighborhood, and brings hundred of trucks into and out of the area nearly every day. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
‘A disaster in slow motion’
Gordon has lived in every part of the Bay Area’s pollution triangle.
She was born in Richmond, where her father and mother moved from racially segregated Arkansas when the shipping industry was booming. They wanted jobs that didn’t involve a plow.
When the shipping economy waned after World War II, the family moved to Hunters Point in San Francisco when Gordon was about 8.
They joined a diverse communitythat spread out from the 866-acre Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Today Hunters Point, also known as Bayview, is 25 percent Latino, 26 percent Black and 36 percent Asian with a growing number of White residents, currently at 8 percent, relocating there.
Gordon’s former neighborhood was home to the shipyard for nearly 30 years ending in 1974. For 12 years ending in 1960, the shipyard was joined by the Navy’s largest nuclear testing lab.
Ships that were targets ofnuclear blast exercises were hauled to docks a few feet from a thriving community. More than 600,000 gallons of nuclear fuel was burned there.
The Environmental Protection Agency listed the abandoned shipyard as a toxic Superfund site in 1989. The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory’s activities “contaminated soil, dust, sediments, surface water and groundwater with petroleum fuels, pesticides, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),” the agency said.
The Navy disputes that the site harmsthe health of area residents. Doctors who launched an effort to test families for exposure disagree.
“It’s getting to where we can look at someone’s urine and tell they’re from Bayview,” said Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a doctor whose office in the community is plastered with maps and pins showing the locations of people who tested positive for a variety of chemicals.
“The toxic burden is the same in the community whether among White women, Chinese American males or African American women,” Sumchai said.
Arieann Harrison’s own urine analysis revealed nine heavy metals in her body. Harrison’s grandfather and mother, both shipyard workers, respectively died of cancer and lung disease. She began the environmental justice organization, Marie Harrison Community Foundation, in honor of her mother. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Arieann Harrison, one of Sumchai’s patients, pressed her nose against a fence at the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard near her home.
Harrison believes the bay’s strong winds have blown trace amounts of contaminated soil from the base throughout her community. Sumchai and another doctor tested her urine and detected several of the chemicals found at the shipyard.
“We’ve got people like Arieann who have eight, nine, ten chemicals in toxic concentrations,” Sumchai said.
For years, Harrison’s mother, the late civil rights crusader Marie Harrison, claimed that the site was “a disaster in slow motion.”
The Harrisons lived on Quesada Street. Arieann’s sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27, Sumchai said. Her father suffered from prostate cancer and died of colon cancer. Her mother, a nonsmoker, died of pulmonary fibrosis at age 71.
In 2018, lawsuits started to fly. A class-action lawsuit seeking damages of $27 billion swelled to 3,000 plaintiffs. Buyers of condominiums and townhouses built near the site sued the developer for failing to disclose the extent of the contamination.
The developers erred in relying on a faulty soil analysis to press ahead with the project. Tetra Tech, a New Jersey engineering firm hired by the Navy to analyze the site and remediate any ground that was radioactive, faces numerous lawsuits.
Three years before owners started taking possession of the homes in 2015, whistleblowers came forward to accuse the engineering firm of fraud. In 2018, a judge sentenced two of its supervisors, Stephen C. Rolfe and Justin E. Hubbard, to 18 months in prison after they pleaded guilty to swapping contaminated soil at the site with clean soil from another.
From grandma to activist
After a second marriage to Ben Gordon, Margaret Gordon left Hunters Point for Oakland in the late 1980s.
Within seven years, Gordon would transition from being a maid who cleaned houses to one of the Bay Area’s fiercest environmental justice activists.
Gordon never saw West Oakland in its heyday. Janice Adam, a friend, could only describe it to her. Adam was one of the few Black kids who grew up in a suburb, Berkeley, because of restrictive housing covenants and rental discrimination that kept African Americans at bay.
But she spent most of her time in West Oakland. That’s where her grandmother lived in a big, three-level house with several bedrooms and a convenience store on the first floor.
“Oh my God, the backyard,” Adam said, “a real backyard that you don’t see in California anymore. It had fruit trees. She had chickens. We got eggs from there.”
Her cousin lived next door. “We played in the street until dark,” Adam said. “I remember the neighborhood. The neighbors really knew each other.”
After she left to attend Howard University in the early 1980s, West Oakland started to lose its pulse and its color.
Linda Lewis and her cousin Janice Adam in front of Adam’s childhood home in Oakland. Adam’s family inherited the house from her grandmother, but lost it soon after. Lewis continues to live in and own the house next door. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
The Cypress Freeway, which cut through the community and divided neighbors, left a deep wound that eventually drove residents away. The Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority also built an above ground station that ran along West Oakland’s center of commerce on 7th Street, turning its vibrant business hub into a dead zone.
Residents found it odd that BART trains ran underground through downtown San Francisco and under as much as 135 feet of water in a tube on the floor of the San Francisco Bay, only to rise above ground for a single stop in West Oakland. Customers stopped patronizing a jazz club because they couldn’t hear the music because of the frequent rumble from trains.
The trains immediately go back underground under downtown Oakland and Berkeley.
With the loss of shipping jobs and homeowner flight, the housing stock rotted. Drug crime moved in with deadly results. At the lowest point, Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton was gunned down by a suspected crack cocaine dealer in 1989.
Maceo Bell lived through it all.
Watching the decline, Bell didn’t greet BART’s arrival as an eyesore; he saw it as a blessing that brought jobs. Bell, 63, said he worked there for 17 years before losinghis job.
He inherited a house from his grandfather but struggled to pay the mortgage because he couldn’t find work. “I took out a loan I never should have took, lost a job and lost the house,” Bell said as he putted golf balls in a park with friends.
His playing partner, Frank Newton, told a similar story about house he inherited. “I couldn’t get loans,” said Newton, 65. “I didn’t qualify. I was about to lose the house, so I sold.”
Margaret Gordon arrived just before a seismic event shook West Oakland. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down portions of the double-decker San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and its connector, the Cypress Freeway.
For a second time, Caltrans essentially ignored West Oakland’s pleas against rebuilding the freeway through the community. The agency vowed to build back bigger — even though in an affluent part of San Francisco, it relented to city wishes and tore down the quake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway.
While preparing the upgrades to the West Oakland freeway in 1996, workers started in a park and unearthed a colorless, carcinogenic gas called vinyl chloride — the same toxic gas that towered over East Palestine following the Ohio train derailment this year.
Surlene Grant, who worked as a community relations officer for Caltrans at the time and went on to become an elected supervisor for the city of San Leandro, said the agency sought to minimize the threat by saying the gas was common.
“I said I’m not going to do that. They said, ‘Yes you are,’” she recalled
After the story broke, Gordon attended a public hearing on it. At the time, “She was, like, a house cleaner,” Grant said. “She was not the most articulate person,” but she knew how to raise her voice.
The Cypress Freeway was not rebuilt. Activists and city officials pushed Caltrans to rout it around West Oakland.
Areas being investigated by the West Oakland Environmental Protection Agency are marked on a map in Margaret Gordon’s office. (Maansi Srivastava/The Washington Post)
Gordon, who trained with the Pacific Institute to understand the pollution risk throughout West Oakland, went on to co-found the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project with Brian Beveridge in 2004. In 2010, she was named to the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act advisory panel, and also won a $100,000 AARP Purpose Prize honoring people over 50 who are “working to build a better future.”
In 2017, California lawmakers passed landmark legislation — Assembly Bill 617 — to address the health impact of polluting infrastructure in California’s urban communities. Gordon was ready to seize the moment.
The indicator project worked with technology companies to measure pollution block by block, when few groups did that kind of air monitoring, with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District joining the effort.
At a recent meeting in West Oakland attended by Gordon, city officials discussed how they are integrating the city’s new general plan with AB 617, aiming to better regulate polluters and improve health outcomes in the community.
In tandem with the air district and other partners, the city will study housing inequality, the quality of the air people breathe indoors and whether housing codes are adequately enforced.
“Our staff is pretty excited about this opportunity to leverage our work,” said Veronica Eady, senior deputy executive officer for policy and equity at the Bay Area air district, which worked closely with Gordon on the project.
After decades of battles, Gordon is hopeful that Oakland can rectify some of the past damage. But how quickly that can happen is another matter.
“I ain’t got but 15 more years myself,” she added. “If they can’t do it in 15 more years, I don’t know what to tell them.”
Versions of this article have also appeared in Stephen Golub’s weekly Benicia Herald Column, “Benicia and Beyond,” and in his national and international affairs blog, A Promised Land: America as a Developing Country.
My new hometown of Benicia, CA hosted its 28th Annual Classic Car Show late last month.
I suppose I could start discussing the event, as well as the global car market’s electrifying trends, by lamenting America’s historic love for gas guzzlers and their legacy of overconsumption and pollution.
Nah.
More on the future later. But for now…
Wow
Having wandered around the show, I must confess to being wowed. It’s the first such gathering I’ve ever been to. I have no idea how many autos were on display…400? 600?
I didn’t come away from it a classic car aficionado. But, even given the old autos’ fuel-consuming excesses, this blast from the past and slice of Americana was a lot of fun.
Most of the vehicles dated from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. They ranged from vintage Fords and Packards to comparatively new behemoths and muscle cars.
Restoring and preserving these beauties seemed like an act of love. Proud owners stood by to answer questions, discuss the engines’ intricacies and otherwise bask in both the sunshine and the perfect shines of their prized possessions – which in most instances are kept more for show than for driving these days.
Overhearing a few of the conversations, I was struck by how little I understood. But you didn’t have to be any kind of expert to enjoy the event.
The owners were mainly male. As a friend joked, strolling amidst so many hundreds-of-horsepower stallions made him feel a surge of testosterone.
Memories
It was tough to pick out favorites from the array of gleaming humdingers. But those that especially caught my eye included a cherry-red ‘31 Model A, a gorgeously detailed Caprice and my neighbor’s dazzling ’65 Mustang, which I’ve glimpsed when he occasionally takes it out for a spin around town.
Another ’65 model, an Impala, brought a flashback to my now-distant past. An Impala was the first car I ever drove, though it wasn’t quite as old or huge as this one. My memory of those good old days was also triggered by the scent of the fragrant combustibles wafting my way from behind the car.
The gathering was fun in other ways as well. It was a family affair, with a fair number of kids and dogs. There were also loads of great food trucks. I indulged in a delicious Louisiana hot link, smothered in onions, BBQ sauce and mustard, and washed down by some freshly made lemonade. The small “beer garden” enclosure was tempting, but at 11 am I wasn’t quite ready for that.
It was the kind of classic Benicia festival that the town is known for.
In sum, a good time was had by all, whether you were a classic car junkie or just an auto layperson like me, wandering around in wonderment.
Driving With Bruce
Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash
Bruce Springsteen fan that I am, I couldn’t help but recall the countless songs in which he references cars: Pink Cadillac, Cadillac Ranch, Born to Run, Thunder Road, Fire, Stolen Car, Used Cars, Ramrod, My Hometown and many more.
And then there are these lyrics from Racing in the Streets:
I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a three-ninety-six
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
But you don’t have to understand those words to know that cars are a part of our culture, our history and our evolution as a country and society.
The Future is (Almost) Now
Which brings me to electric vehicles (EVs) – or, for the sake of statistics discussed here: all-electric, plug-in, light vehicles (excluding hybrids).
I won’t delve into the massive and well-recognized environmental benefits of shifting to EVs. Suffice to say that they are a very good thing for combating climate change, improving our air quality and enhancing our health and well-being.
Before we get too charged up about the promise of EVs, though, a few additional considerations need to intrude. There’s the challenge of installing rapid charging stations across the country, though recent federal legislation funds a substantial increase in such facilities. Then there is also the matter of sourcing the materials crucial to for the cars’ batteries, including social and economic justice challenges that the process imposes.
In addition, it takes about 17,500 miles before American EVs reach the “break-even point,” where their cumulative carbon emissions start to compare favorably with those of their internal combustion engine counterparts. (The EVs pose a greater initial environmental cost due to carbon dispersals from their manufacture and related processes.)
But that initial emission burden is a relative drop in the bucket, in view of the average car’s lifespan (including for EVs) of well over 100,000 miles. And the break-even point is gradually decreasing, due to improved production practices and the shift toward power plants that source sun, wind, hydroelectric and other sustainable energy to power EV batteries.
In Norway, for example, where autos rely mostly on hydroelectric sources (and which boasts the highest EV per capita rate in the world), the environmental balance for EVs becomes preferable after barely 8,000 miles of use.
None of this is to deny that many Americans are still wedded to SUVs and pickup trucks. But there’s great progress in this regard as well, as more of them go electric. In addition, by virtue of their especially large batteries, the Ford F-150 Lightning and other electric pickups can become virtual power plants for homes, construction equipment and myriad other uses.
This change for the better is racing down the road pretty quickly. A poll of over 1,000 automobile executives yielded an average forecast that over half of U.S car sales will be EVs by 2030, consistent with President Biden’s sales goal. The survey produced similar predictions for the Japanese and huge China markets. Whether or not we meet that target, the evolution of our automobile industry is well underway.
The Market Speaks
Will consumers actually fulfill the automobile executives’ predictions? This is where the rubber hits the road. For many buyers, this will quite justifiably hinge on environmental considerations, in terms of cutting emissions of greenhouse gases and other forms of pollution.
For many others, it will come down to price. But with expensive gasoline, increased competition and government incentives accelerating the transition to EVs, the days of trendy Teslas dominating the field seem doomed. Lower EV maintenance costs will also help move the market away from internal combustion engines.
Speaking of price, China and India have EVs on their domestic markets that respectively cost $4,600 and $5,800. To be sure, their batteries are small, they are just runabouts for driving locally and they probably wouldn’t pass U.S. regulatory muster. But the point is that a burgeoning, global investment in EVs is producing a variety of cars for a variety of uses and societies.
Beyond the Pink Cadillac
Which brings me back to the vintage vehicles, muscle cars, Springsteen’s Pink Cadillacs and so many more of today’s collectors’ items. The past is past. We can admire the old while embracing the benefits of the new for our environment, our health, our pocketbooks and our planet.
I welcome such changes. I eagerly anticipate more yet to come. But I’m also looking forward to next year’s Classic Car Show.
Benicia Public Library’s Sustainability Series continues with free zero-waste cooking demonstration this Thursday, May 11, at 7pm
The first 50 participants will receive groceries to take home with them to try the demonstrated recipes and techniques themselves. | Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply, adding up to billion of pounds of food and just as much money wasted every year. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency reports that food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills, where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
As our individual grocery bills and greenhouse gases climb, it becomes increasingly important on a personal and global level to be mindful of food waste.
As a part of the Book to Action Sustainability series All Benicia Can Save, the Benicia Public Library is hosting a special cooking demonstration. This coming Thursday, May 11th at 7pm, join Chef Stephanie Oelsligle Jordan for a Zero-Waste Cooking Demonstration.
During this FREE, 90-minute demonstration participants will learn to curb food waste in the kitchen before the plate even makes it to the table while creating excellent dishes using seasonal produce.
No registration is required. The Library is located at 150 E L Street in Benicia.
The first 50 participants will receive groceries to take home with them to try the demonstrated recipes and techniques themselves!
[Note from BenIndy Contributor Nathalie Christian: As a library enthusiast and big fan of efforts to curb the huge problem of excessive food waste, I want to commend the the Benicia Public Library’s staff, volunteers and especially the library’s fairly new director, Jennifer Baker, on their ongoing efforts to bring such important programs and educational opportunities to Benicia. I also want to acknowledge that the event will be demonstrated by Sustainable Solano’s Local Food Program Manager, who is also a chef. This is an amazing opportunity to learn from the best at one of the best places in Benicia. Because food is my profession as well as my passion, I will not pass on this opportunity to point readers to this list of excellent books regarding zero-waste and less-waste cooking, curated by Trvst. – N.C.]
During this FREE, 90-minute demonstration participants will learn to curb food waste in the kitchen before the plate even makes it to the table while creating excellent dishes using seasonal produce.
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