Electrifying our future: is it the last great hope?

Hallelujah, as Handel put it in his Chorus, hallelujah, we shall be saved. And the name of the saviour is the electric engine. It is blowing its bugle and galloping our way. All we have to do is to hold on for a few years. Then suddenly we shall all be driving electric cars and all manner of things shall be well.

We’ve had electric vehicles for as long as I’ve been alive. The milk delivered to our house when I was a kid came on an electric truck. The bread didn’t. The coal didn’t. But milk came with an electric whirr and the empties left as quietly.

Golf carts were already electric too and powerful enough to lug the Trumps of yesteryear from tee to green to gin. But somehow the electric engine never migrated into other vehicles. This had something to do with the inefficiency of batteries but rather more to do with the oil industry. Oil was cheap and oil was abundant and oil would go on for ever.

But now, so very suddenly, the electric motor is in vogue.

Government ministers around the world compete to boast of how soon their national fleet will be wholly and greenly electric. By 2050, says one. Ha, says another, we shall be all humming and virtuous by 2040. Curiously, New Zealand has not joined the chorus.

Even though we have to import our petrol and even though we have vents to the steaming heart of the earth from which to generate electricity, along with wind and sun and water in abundance, the latest projection for New Zealand is that by 2040 the proportion of our cars that are electric will have soared to 8 per cent.

Of course. The boastful ministers of elsewhere aren’t really making predictions. They know that they’ll be dead or gaga by the time 2040 comes round, so they’ll never be held to account. And besides, no one will remember what they said. They’re just tossing a date out to gratify the zeitgeist that is desperate for any form of optimism. For we are drenched in gloom.

Mankind dreads the future, as it has not done since the plagues of the Middle Ages. We see nothing ahead but decline. We see mounting pollution, barren seas, animal extinctions, smothering deserts, death by heat, death by drowning, death by storms and death by drought. We see poverty, misery, hunger and war, a Book of Revelations future that our grandchildren will have no choice but to read every morning when they open their curtains. Both rich and poor can see it coming.

The rich are hoping to swap this planet for another one. The poor are merely hoping. And hope has recently come to rest on the shoulders of the electric engine.

Her sister the internal combustion engine represents everything that has gone wrong. Unsustainable, noisy, dirty, destructive and greedy, she is a metaphor for the part of ourselves that got us into this mess.

She has scoured the land and sea for oil and sucked it up and burned it willy nilly. She may have shrunk the world with aeroplanes and given the prosperous few unprecedented freedom of movement, but she has done so at great cost. She has acted like one who burns down her house to warm her hands.

We have clung to her for a century but now we are now turning on her. We want to expel her, like the goat that ancient priests would burden with the people’s sins and then drive beyond the city walls to die.

And with her will go the oil barons. Consider them. Putin depends on oil. Maduro too. The loathsome House of Saud is built on it. Trump adores oil. Saddam grew from it. Oil breeds monsters. But not for very much longer.

Soon the world will whirr with electric engines. The air will start to clean itself.

People will taste the sweetness in their lungs and hear the quiet on the streets and they will see that it is good. And it will be the catalyst for great and lasting change, and people will finally come to their senses, plant trees, ease the climate back from the brink, stop fighting, stop being greedy, stop overpopulating, stop using plastic, stop electing bullies, stop raping the sea and ruining the land, stop believing they are loved by some fictional super-daddy and stop going to war on the pretext of that super-daddy.

United in one common cause all the nations of the earth will hold hands and go skipping through the meadows like the von Trapp children.

So that’s that then, we are saved, and all without giving up the cars we love. Hallelujah.