Does owning a Leaf = your an environmentalist?

[Reddy]

I do have environmental tendencies. I compost my food scraps, I raise a lot of my own food, I don't waste resources, but my primary reason was to create demand for electric vehicles. I was concerned that if no one bought them, car companies would give up and go back to making crappy ICE cars. So, my wife and I just thought we would help stimulate demand for EV's and EV infrastructure. We did the same thing with organic produce in the grocery store. It was more expensive, but we kept buying it and now there is a whole section of organic produce.

I guess it's our way of voting with our dollars. Voting with our vote doesn't seem to get us much anymore. :roll:

+1

 

[Train]

An environmentalist by any other name is still and environmentalist.

You are an environmentalist if you bought a Leaf to save money on gasoline, or put in solar to stop wasting the sunlight that falls on your roof.

You just either dont know it or are ashamed to admit it.
I cant imagine why.

Maybe you arent if you can answer yes to all of these:
Do you pour your used oil in the street?
Refuse to recycle your newspapers in the recycle bin from the city?
Leave the all the lights and AC on high in your house when you are not home?
Use a hose to wash leaves off your driveway?
Run the water when you shave and brush your teeth?

A test? I love tests.

This just in...there's a smug alert.

I'm so glad we have someone who thinks they are the arbiter of what comprises an "environmentalist."

Maybe you can tell us how much square footage of house is too much. Can someone own more than one home and be an "environmentalist?" Can they own three? Is a boat OK? If so, how many boats? How many cars? All those Beverly Hills mansions, isn't that indulgent and unnecessary? Buying all those DVD's, electronic gadgets, widescreen TV's, the latest smartphone, millions of plastic toys, Ipods, and the billions of other products produced every year.

Someone who only rides a bike might think that people who own and drive electric cars are not environmentalists. That they are not committed to making the lifestyle changes that make one a "true" environmentalist. So are you a "true" environmentalist or one that that assuages their own guilt by just buying yet another consumer product?

So I guess the bicyclist cares more and is more "green" than the EV driver. The person who walks ultimately cares more than the bicyclist. Maybe they consider all the resources required to produce these electric cars to be selfish.

Kind of like all the people that live in cities who feel "urban sprawl" is somehow living less responsibly yet that concrete jungle they live in was once pristine land.

Maybe, just maybe, people don't want some "environmentalist" moniker attached to them because of some judgemental people who claim to know exactly what is and isn't being "environmentally friendly" and "green."

The earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, has survived meteor strikes so devastating and catastrophic that wiped out most living things on earth for a considerable period of time, yet we need to "save the planet" from internal combustion engines. Humans have been on the earth for a blink of an eye timewise, yet somehow th planet needs "saved."

Only some humans could be so arrogant and self important to think that they or an internal combustion engine could somehow "kill" the earth.

 

[TRONZ]

So far this has been a supprising number of peoplr that purchased a Leaf for non-environmentalist reasons. Nissan need to take a look at their marketing plan and change it up to appeal to this segment. It might be larger then Nissan thinks.

I agree. I think the national security question should be emphasized more strongly. Jim Woolsey (former CIA director) has a bumper sticker on his Volt that reads "Osama hates this car!"

Here is an image of the sticker form the volt-gm forum:

But he's fish food. I like it but needs to stay current. Since their citizens did 9/11 how about just "F**K Saudi Arabia!"

 

[Aeolus]

Who isn't an environmentalist? Even in the most conservative areas, you will find strong support for clean air and water, protection of open space and habitat, energy efficiency, and public transportation (as long as someone else is riding it).

Even wacky climate change deniers like Dana Rohrabacher show pictures of themselves strolling on the beach with their families and emphasize where federal money went for clean air and clean water. He may have voted against every bill that supported clean air and water or included project funding, but he will take credit when it is spent.

As to the central question, each of us has complex reasons for buying a LEAF. Mine include both environmental and practical reasons, and are linked with the project of installing a new roof and solar panels on my roof. Let's focus on the practical reasons, starting with the roof leak last winter that convinced me that it's time to replace my roof. I've been waiting to replace the roof to even look at doing a PV system.

And my Acura has 134,000 miles on it, with piddling, yet expensive maintenance issues arising, as well as the need to do a series of major service components that cost in the thousands of dollars. Plus that sixty dollars a fill-up with high test.

• 1.) Installing a PV system on my roof is about the highest return investment I can find right now. I'm estimating better than a 10% return, tax-free, inflation-proof. which is safer and far higher than I can get on anything else.
  
  2.) As long as I'm installing a new roof and PV system, the marginal cost of increasing the size of the system to accommodate the additional KWH used by an electric car is relatively small. Same permit fees, roughly the same labor cost and inverter cost for the contractor. Just more panels and brackets.
  
  3.) The time of use billing rates that we get from SCE are very favorable as long as we charge the car between mindnight and six AM, and keep our power use low during peak weekday hours while we are generating electricity. With an electric car, I can zero out my bill even if I am only generating 80% of the power I use.

So doing the research, it looks like I can buy a lifetime of supply for an electric car for about $3,000.00 in net additional capital investment now.

I really like the idea of saving $15,000 on fuel and maintenance over the next 100,000 miles of driving. Driving past gas stations. Not paying for oil changes, air filters, fuel filters and related routine service. Not paying to replace the timing chain.

Then we add in the other assumptions.

• We are past peak oil, so the price of fossil fuels will only increase, and increase at a growing rate. Electricity rates will also increase at better than 8% a year.
  
  The PV/EV movement needs converts and missionaries. It's one of the only paths to sustainability that makes any sense on a large scale. Pasowino said it really well,
  
  

  I do have environmental tendencies. I compost my food scraps, I raise a lot of my own food, I don't waste resources, but my primary reason was to create demand for electric vehicles. I was concerned that if no one bought them, car companies would give up and go back to making crappy ICE cars. So, my wife and I just thought we would help stimulate demand for EV's and EV infrastructure. We did the same thing with organic produce in the grocery store. It was more expensive, but we kept buying it and now there is a whole section of organic produce.
  
  I guess it's our way of voting with our dollars. Voting with our vote doesn't seem to get us much anymore.

  Climate change is real. As far as I can tell, the only mistakes that have been made have been that the projections have been far too optimistic. The symptoms of man-made global warming are increasing faster than anyone anticipated.

 

[Train]

Climate change is real

Climate change has always been real. It's natural. It's been changing for billions of years. No one denies that climate changes.

Some people will deny or be skeptical that humans and their inventions have or can changed the climate. 35 years ago, we were thought to be entering an ice age.

Climate will continue to change. With or without internal combustion engines.

 

[davewill]

I did it for one simple reason: I believe BEVs represent the ONLY path to clean transportation in the future. Bio-fuels pose environmental and societal (food or fuel?) problems that seem insoluble to me. Hydrogen just seems like a way keep using fossil fuels since they are the easiest sources of H2. If we ever figure out how to do truly plentiful clean power, it will almost certainly end up being electric and usable by BEVs, so I think we should be putting most of our eggs in that basket. Most of the other reasons stated here, national security, sticking it to big oil, even saving money, are secondary to me. So, no BEV does not "equal" environmentalist, but environmentalism was certainly my reason.

 

[dgpcolorado]

Add me to the list of those who agree with pasowino: we need to make EVs a successful product or the car companies won't keep (or start) making them. How else but to vote with one's dollars?

My main reason for supporting EVs is the geopolitical one, to reduce dependence on oil and stop sending my dollars overseas to the petrodictators. Since I will likely have the only Leaf within 200 miles, for some time to come, I view it as an advertisement for alternatives to ICE transportation. If EV ranges increase, costs come down, and charge stations appear, they may someday be practical even out here in the boondocks.

That's my hope anyway.

 

[Stoaty]

The earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, has survived meteor strikes so devastating and catastrophic that wiped out most living things on earth for a considerable period of time, yet we need to "save the planet" from internal combustion engines. Humans have been on the earth for a blink of an eye timewise, yet somehow th planet needs "saved."

Only some humans could be so arrogant and self important to think that they or an internal combustion engine could somehow "kill" the earth.

Of course the earth will survive, but whether it will be a good place to live for our descendants is another question. I would say that irrevocably altering the climate isn't going to be good for future generations, not to mention species that are adapted to specific climate conditions. While voluntary actions are valuable, we need rules that preserve the ecosystems that we depend on.

 

[davewill]

The earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, has survived meteor strikes ...

Of course the earth will survive, but ...

There's already a number of threads used for "debating" (read: yelling past each other) climate science. Is there any way to keep the pie fight out of here or is this another thread I have to run from, screaming?

 

[Anonymous]

At 10.3 cents a kWh (assuming you will use more than the 8.4 cents rate), this is factors in very well into owning an EV here in Western WA.

While were on the topic of being environmentally motivated; considering that the 3 hydro damns (Baker River, Snoqualmie Falls and Electron) basically provide more power output than what the Puget Sound area consumes, you can say that it is nearly carbon free.

Yeah, but unfortunately for those same reasons, it's hard to be motivated to do solar in Washington. Now that we have decent panels made in Washington (which gives an additional incentive) you can actually sell the power produced by your panels back for more than what it costs you to buy them from PSE. Kind of strange, particularly when the times that solar would be producing the most are the times when our non-green plants are generally shut down... Seems to me that the financial incentive is there, but not the environmental one.

 

[Fabio]

You are 100% right. The Earth will survive the massive amounts of CO2 we keep pumping in the atmosphere.
Humans won't, though. So environmentalists should be called humanist instead.

The earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, has survived meteor strikes so devastating and catastrophic that wiped out most living things on earth for a considerable period of time, yet we need to "save the planet" from internal combustion engines. Humans have been on the earth for a blink of an eye timewise, yet somehow th planet needs "saved."

Only some humans could be so arrogant and self important to think that they or an internal combustion engine could somehow "kill" the earth.

 

[Fabio]

quoting from skeptical science:

<<
In the thirty years leading up to the 1970s, available temperature recordings suggested that there was a cooling trend. As a result some scientists suggested that the current inter-glacial period could rapidly draw to a close, which might result in the Earth plunging into a new ice age over the next few centuries. This idea could have been reinforced by the knowledge that the smog that climatologists call ‘aerosols’ – emitted by human activities into the atmosphere – also caused cooling. In fact, as temperature recording has improved in coverage, it’s become apparent that the cooling trend was most pronounced in northern land areas and that global temperature trends were in fact relatively steady during the period prior to 1970.

At the same time as some scientists were suggesting we might be facing another ice age, a greater number published contradicting studies. Their papers showed that the growing amount of greenhouse gasses that humans were putting into the atmosphere would cause much greater warming – warming that would a much greater influence on global temperature than any possible natural or human-caused cooling effects.

By 1980 the predictions about ice ages had ceased, due to the overwhelming evidence contained in an increasing number of reports that warned of global warming. Unfortunately, the small number of predictions of an ice age appeared to be much more interesting than those of global warming, so it was those sensational 'Ice Age' stories in the press that so many people tend to remember.

Survey of 68 Scientific Studies of Global Cooling literature between 1965 and 1979 show that 62% predicted warming while only 10% predicted cooling (Peterson 2008)
>>

There is a almost universal agreement (98%) among climate scientists that humans are causing it climate change.

The fact that journalist or politicians are paid to push the opposite opinion should make you think twice when "choosing" who to trust

Some people will deny or be skeptical that humans and their inventions have or can changed the climate. 35 years ago, we were thought to be entering an ice age.

Climate will continue to change. With or without internal combustion engines.

 

[GPowers]

Time out I would like to keep the thread on topic.

The topic is: Anyone else beside adric22 and myself that bought the Leaf for non-environmentalist reasons?

So far it look like there a lot of people that purchased the leaf for non-environmentalist reasons.

Thanks

 

[TRONZ]

Does buying a LEAF make you an Environmentalist?

Probably no more than buying a Hummer makes you a conservative.

 

[JimSouCal]

The topic is: Anyone else beside adric22 and myself that bought the Leaf for non-environmentalist reasons?

With you on that.

By the way, to add, after several months of ownership, based on my needs, I see: ***the LEAF is the most convenient practical and best purchase of an automobile in my life*** (presuming the battery holds up over the years).

And like others I am an early adopter, and have some artifacts in boxed attic storage that didn't quite hit. Betamax. A portable thermal ribbon brother typewriter. I keep them for a museum I suppose.

 

[SharonaLA]

I bought it for environmental reasons, but I especial love using the carpool lane to get to work. Saves me 20-30 minutes each day. Can't wait for the Northbound 405 carpool lane to be finished.

 

[eeman]

I bought my Leaf to save on gas money.

 

[Jayhawk]

We bought our Leaf to save gas money ... and to get cool new technology to play with before others ... and to screw the Saudis ... and because it just makes sense with our driving habits (we are stranded in a traffic-clogged part of LA and only commute/travel within a 5-mile radium 99% of the time) ... plus we have a SUV for longer trips. I don't know if any of those reasons make me an environmentalist or not. Depends on how you define that term.

 

[thankyouOB]

We bought our Leaf to save gas money ... and to get cool new technology to play with before others ... and to screw the Saudis ... and because it just makes sense with our driving habits (we are stranded in a traffic-clogged part of LA and only commute/travel within a 5-mile radium 99% of the time) ... plus we have a SUV for longer trips. I don't know if any of those reasons make me an environmentalist or not. Depends on how you define that term.

It makes you an environmentalist. You are NOT using gasoline and you are NOT polluting out your exhaust pipe.
It is like folks who eat steak. They are carnivores.
You can say you do it for the taste, or because you want to get maximum protein for calories, or because you are a body-builder.
But you are still a carnivore.

 

[smkettner]

It makes you an environmentalist. You are NOT using gasoline and you are NOT polluting out your exhaust pipe.
It is like folks who eat steak. They are carnivores.
You can say you do it for the taste, or because you want to get maximum protein for calories, or because you are a body-builder.
But you are still a carnivore.

I disagree. Carnivore describes that you eat meat only.

But there are plenty of environmentalists that burn gas in their vehicles.

Eventually people may buy an EV on looks and performance alone. Then the salesman will explain it runs on electric with a customer reply of 'whatever just so it goes'.