It may be a very opportune time to remove the For Sale sign from the Green Monster. If you are anything like me, you love old stuff, more commonly called antiques, especially old cars and trucks. Even old farm tractors and steam engines. Old plates, cups and saucers, not so much.
If you have one of these relics in working order, why then you really have something. Just drop down to the CTC parking lot on a Tuesday evening and chat with some of the car buffs there and you’ll see what I mean. Some of those gems have their engines as clean as the interior of my current ride, which I mean to vacuum out one of these days. I often wonder if I ought to have kept one of my previous rides, say that ’55 Chevy Bel Air or even my AMC Javelin – they certainly would be classics by now.
Now Premier Wynn has thrown a cat among the pigeons by offering more of your cash for ‘junkers’. This is in an effort to clear the air here in Ontario. She wants all those old fossil-fuel burning vehicles off the roads and into the scrap yard. So keen is the Premier that she will give some of your money away to folks who can be tempted to get rid of their old cars and trucks.
Now I would find it difficult to throw old Green on the junk heap just for a few loonies. And the good Premier knows this. And so she says she will pay more of your tax dollars to retrofit Green into a natural gas burning truck. Now, if you have ever experienced the unexpected WHOOSH of flame as your barbeque ignites, you might be leery of a natural gas vehicle, but fear not, the automotive science guys and gals have this covered.
The thing is, there are not a lot of places where one can refill the NG tank to keep on truckin’ down the highway. So Wynnie says she’ll use more of your tax dollars to build NG stations all across Ontario. I agree it is a fine idea to get those smoking diesels off the road. Either that or get the German engineers at VW to make their exhaust less noticeable. There is a little problem with her plan as it sits right now – and that is what do these fleets of NG trucks do when they leave the Province of Ontario? Is Wynnie going to fund filling stations all the way across Canada, down through the States and into Mexico?
Perhaps her friends who are turning good edible corn into Ethanol will come up with a solution for her. Maybe if they added 20% ethanol to diesel that would cut down on the carbon emissions from those big trucks. Or better still, use some of that free methane from our old dumps to run those trucks. If ethanol exhaust smells like popcorn farts you can imagine what the methane exhaust will remind you of.
If you are thinking Wynnie is just going after the trucks, think again. She wants us all driving electric cars. She is offering to increase the rebate by another thousand dollars of your money if you buy an electric car. And to sweeten the pot, she says if you move into a newly constructed house, it will have a built-in charging station and you will get the electricity for next to nothing! Your neighbour’s electric bill may increase but you will be on Easy Street.
(Easy Street is in that new subdivision where all the houses are heated with geo thermal heat pumps and everyone has a driver-less electric car. There are no lawns since cut grass is a carbon source. No Barbeques or backyard fire pits, of course. Fire places are LED fantasies and . . . the rest is too horrible to foretell.)
There is good news though from the Premier. GM is going to hire a whole passel of workers to think about and design new electric, ethanol-burning and driverless cars. There was no mention that GM will be dropping the Camaro and Equinox manufacturing lines here in Ontario next year but those assembly line workers will certainly find jobs elsewhere.
In the meantime, I’m searching the web to see if I can retrofit my old Briggs & Stratton gas lawn mower engine. The ethanol in the gas has gummed up the carburetor again. Maybe I could take the electric motor out of that old blender Aunt Martha gave us for Christmas twenty years ago - it looks sturdy enough . . . the grass isn’t growing much since I stopped watering it when we went onto the meter system anyway. Just saying.
