by Neil Young
I called Bruce Falls and told him what had happened with the generator. He said we should reboot the car by turning it off and on and then try again. We did. The generator came on and started charging, but as soon as I started to drive, Miss Pegi’s batteries started to lose charge. The highway patrol escorted us to headquarters to park the car in a secure place and regroup. No one wanted to leave Miss Pegi by the side of the road.
I noticed that the generator would charge the batteries as long as the car was not moving. I ran Miss Pegi’s generator in the highway patrol lot for a few minutes and we recharged the batteries while she rested, making enough power to easily reach the summit and then glide down to Reno, easily recharging the batteries with regenerative braking on the long decline.
The highway patrol had been very helpful. There were many more cameras. As I stood in the lot, a couple of patrolmen and -women approached and we took a few more pictures, one with a little guitar that I signed before we headed out for Nevada. As we left, Miss Pegi seemed to be enjoying all the attention.
We arrived in Reno and checked in at a big casino hotel. Slot machines rang out as stale air settled on the giant gaming-hall floor. Folks shuffled in and out, working people getting a break and enjoying their time off. We had parked outside across the street at an electric car–charging station provided by the hotel. From my room on the fifth floor I could see Miss Pegi parked in the lot beside a new Tesla Model S sedan. Times were changing.
I had arranged for Bruce Falls to ship us a data recorder. A data recorder connects to the car’s computer and records everything the car does. The next morning we would connect the data recorder, capture the generator event as it happened, and email the data back to Bruce at AVL for analysis. Miss Pegi Continental was really becoming a twenty-first-century car!
In the morning, we met four ladies from Petaluma who were traveling in the Tesla. We took a few pictures with them and interviewed them for the film. They were characters, traveling in their electric car to go gambling in Tahoe. Miss Pegi enjoyed showing up the Tesla, while the Tesla pretended not to notice. We laughed a lot about that.
When we connected the data recorder and took off to the interstate, climbing back toward Truckee, the generator malfunctioned right away, running but not charging the batteries. This time we captured the data and sent it back to Bruce, who analyzed it and discovered that the fuel pump was not working correctly and that the motor was starving for fuel.
It was all making sense.
Miss Pegi was once again the center of attention.
Roy Brizio had found Jerry Price for us. Jerry verified that the fuel pump in Miss Pegi was completely trashed, crammed with debris and broken beyond repair. It turned out that my vintage pumps at Feelgood’s had delivered contaminated fuel, the cause of Miss Pegi’s original wound. My pumps were installed incorrectly.
It was Sunday, and when the service department at Jones West Ford, Reno’s biggest Ford dealer, couldn’t locate the part, they gave us a used Ford Escape Hybrid to remove the fuel pump from in order to replace our broken one. The good folks at that Ford dealership had been extremely helpful and generous.
After the repair was done at Jerry’s, we went to Jones West Ford and had pictures taken with the courteous staff. Miss Pegi enjoyed her photo shoot there immensely with the staff all taking pictures around her striking beauty, her chrome shining in the morning sun.
Then we were back on the road and all was well again, although we had lost a few days. Soon we were out of Nevada and well into Idaho, but we were not yet out of the woods. According to Bruce Falls, we may have done more unseen damage. He was still worried that running Miss Pegi while she was starved for fuel had overheated and possibly damaged her. That stuck in the back of my mind.
• • •
AMID ALL THE NUMBERS and emissions calculations there was something new that I found hard to explain. I was starting to have a relationship with Miss Pegi. Every morning I would polish and clean her beautiful metal and chrome lines, caressing her classic American Metal Dream shapes with soft cloths. She was truly one of a kind, beautiful in form and function, performing flawlessly in her completely new way, a truly magnificent machine. And she was definitely feminine. She loved attention and would do things to get it. Having a lot of guys standing around trying to figure out why she would not do something seemed like it was fun for her. She was unpredictable and predictable at the same time. If you did not do the right thing, she would always let you know.
It felt so good to be on the road again with Miss Pegi in her element, the open highway, cruising along in the quiet natural splendor. The countryside was beautiful, especially Montana’s majestic mountain ranges, and we continued onward to the great prairies, crossing rivers, passing peaceful serene lakes and green-carpet meadows. Turning north toward Alberta, we crossed the international border the next day. The enchanting scenery and vastness of North America was a feast for our eyes. We savored and captured some awesome traveling shots as the miles rolled by.
Every morning I would get up to clean and polish her beautiful rims, accenting her graceful metal lines, making sure Miss Pegi was ready for the road again and looking good. Those were my peaceful times, meditative morning beginnings that I really enjoyed as I rubbed off the insects and grime that we had accumulated over the miles.
Grating on my mind was the CO2 of all of the cars and trucks we saw every single day. I knew it was a vast amount, and I knew trying to change that would not be easy. Not easy for anyone. We had a habit. I thought about it long and hard. Miss Pegi had a convincing message. She proved you didn’t need to use fossil fuel to move from place to place. Nothing spoke like the presence of the car. She existed.
• • •
LOOMING ON THE HORIZON was an unknown. We had heard about it: the Highway of Death. That was the name the locals had given to Highway 63, which ran north from Edmonton to Fort McMurray, the nearest Alberta town to some of the dirtiest oil on planet Earth. Oil from there polluted so badly that it made Alberta equal to the country of Switzerland in CO2 emissions.
Alberta was naturally beautiful, a Canadian jewel, but when we rode on the Highway of Death we found that it had earned its name by being an extremely dangerous two-lane road often occupied by giant double-wide loads that traveled in both directions while busily supplying the oil industry. When these trucks met on the road it was unbelievable that they almost always missed one another.
Along with the giant double-wides, hundreds of fast-moving, newly purchased pickup trucks owned by the oil workers flew by, passing whenever they could. Their drivers had toiled long hours for wages to take or send money back home to their families, alongside temporary foreign workers who stayed in camps of dwellings made out of storage containers. They were the hard workers.
For me, it was an unsettling journey. The fight against CO2 abuse was turning personal. In my heart I knew that CO2 emissions must be scaled back, way back, and social awareness of this danger to the earth was a key to reversing the trend of abuse. I also knew that many hardworking people depended on this dirty, oil-harvesting activity as their source of livelihood. If I fought back on CO2 and oil companies, I was directly hurting these working people. That bothered me. I struggled to find a balance with it.
I respected them but was compelled to go against those hard workers because they were digging us into a hole that future generations would have tremendous trouble climbing out of. I am talking about my own grandchildren.
• • •
CO2 EMISSIONS are disproportionately large in tar sands extractions, the most inefficient and wasteful way to harvest fossil fuel on the planet. It is this oil that will flow through the Keystone XL pipeline if it is approved by President Obama. A new study in the USA concluded that the pipeline would not add to the CO2 emissions meaningfully, reducing pressure on the president to make a decision that might be unpopular with oil interests. Anyone with reason
ing power could see that this study was not valid. Why would the oil companies build anything that was not going to increase the flow of oil? I can’t ignore the fact that it was being built to carry the dirtiest oil on the planet—oil with three times the carbon emissions of conventional oil—to the world market through a tax-free zone in Texas, virtually ensuring none of the wealth from it went to America except for the few temporary jobs to build it. Such misleading information is common in a corporate government overrun with oil lobbies. And then there’s climate change to consider. This was an opportunity for the leader of the free world to stand and deliver. It was a real world-history moment.
Once we safely arrived in Fort McMurray, we could smell petroleum in the air and taste it in our throats. It was in our eyes and in our nostrils even though we were still some twenty-five miles away from the nearest tar sands site, which happened to be the only site open to the public. All of the other ones in the area were verboten. Those roads just disappeared into Alberta’s pristine boreal forests on their way to what could only be described as a series of ugly scars on the history of Canada, a lasting testimony to what men blinded by quick money will do.
Fort McMurray had boomtown features: exceptionally high-priced food, bars and prostitutes, money and drugs. The most recent years had seen huge growth, which caused traffic jams for miles. Odd for a rural town. I wondered how the original residents felt. Mixed feelings, I imagined.
We had hired a helicopter to film Miss Pegi from the sky as she traveled around the only tar sands development operation that we could get access to. The pilots were very nice folks who did a wonderful job for us. They usually worked for the oil companies, and went back to doing that as soon as we left.
As Miss Pegi approached the oil sands operations site on the perimeter road, we passed the many poisonous tailings ponds (some as large as lakes) that surround each development area. Those ponds were where the oil companies stored the poisonous water left over from the process of extracting oil from the sands. The water was originally from the river but now it was poison. The flawed idea was that the poison in the tailings ponds would be absorbed into the land and somehow go away. Air cannons were firing constantly to stop wildlife from entering the poisonous water and killing themselves. When I noticed metal scarecrows installed in the toxic lakes to further discourage the wildlife from entering, I was reminded of a story a First Nations woman had told me the previous day about a family of bears that tried to swim across a tailings pond, only to die a few hundred feet from shore.
There were 182 square kilometers of toxic and deadly tailings ponds already in Alberta. I had learned that many of the tailings ponds from the other operations sites were located close to the Athabasca River and were silently leaching into its freshwater. The danger of one of these tailings ponds breeching and filling into the river was unspeakable. Everyone knew it could happen. Two months after my visit, the first one did.
Ancient Canadian treaties, now broken, gave the local First Nations peoples the right to hunt and fish in these lands to sustain their life. Native descendants were now dying of cancer. The great Athabasca River was polluted, enough to make the fish the First Nations people used to eat deformed and inedible, and the water they once drank undrinkable. According to the First Nations peoples, animals that used to be their food were now all too sick to eat.
The oil companies had fought long and hard to avoid the blame for this injustice, but science and discovery had proven their guilt. The giant oil interests continued to fight on with their vast resources, contending that they were not responsible for the devastation they caused. Doctors who identified rare cancers among First Nations peoples living near the area were discredited with false stories that were later debunked. But the damage had been done to the physicians’ reputations. Some physicians were hesitant to treat victims of diseases connected to the industry as the oil companies intimidation and fear spread.
First Nations peoples were dying of cancer at elevated rates. The Edmonton Journal and CBC reported that many of the physicians’ and scientists’ stories were true, and quoted notable groups such as Queen’s University in Kingston and Environment Canada, who in a joint study looked at core samples from six lakes within ninety kilometers of the oil sands. The authors focused on cancer-causing chemicals that are released when things are burned. They can occur naturally, but burning petroleum leaves a unique fingerprint, so the scientists were able to trace the source: the Alberta tar sands development. The Alberta Cancer Board found elevated rates of rare malignancies 280 kilometers north of Fort McMurray.
Miss Pegi floated silently through it all, shining in the sun, her ultimate power source.
Daryl Hannah joined us again, bringing information about the First Nations peoples and the impact of the tar sands on their community and land. She traveled with us and interviewed some of the First Nations people to help us gain another perspective for the film. It was then that we realized that the best way to slow the reckless oil sands CO2-intensive development in Alberta was to tell people about the ancient treaties between Canada and the First Nations. Canadians needed to be aware of the terrible secret that these historic and binding documents, part of Canada’s constitution, were being broken by their government.
We met with the local tribes and chiefs and vowed to do a series of concerts across Canada called “Honour the Treaties,” to raise awareness and funds for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation legal defense as they took on the oil companies and the Canadian government, a government currently led by a science denier and treaty breaker, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
After a few more days in Alberta, we left the area and journeyed southeast across the border toward Washington, DC. I had an appointment there to speak to the National Farmers Union about biofuels. I knew I would have a lot to say about Fort McMurray oil sands and the coming end of the fossil fuel age, and I thought about it all the way down there.
I was polishing away early one morning in a motel parking lot, making Miss Pegi shine in the sun. A pile of rags was growing on the asphalt. Miss Pegi’s chrome was done and the sun was fully up. I could feel the heat. Then I was on her rear fins, working and thinking that, on our present course, by 2050 the world would use seventeen terawatts more energy than it is using now. That’s twice as much as today. We would have to look to the sun for energy, master-storing it and converting it to electricity, and using it to power civilization.
As I scrubbed Miss Pegi’s windshield clean of bugs and dirt, I remembered an article in the International Herald Tribune headlined “Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Gas,” about one of the first energy projects to take advantage of the thawing in the Arctic. Global warming had melted enough Arctic ice to open up new direct polar routes to ship natural gas from Russia to China to create more CO2! “If we don’t sell them the fuel, someone else will,” a Russian Novatek spokesman had said with a shrug, ending the article.
Working on her driver’s window, I started making plans. In the film we were making, activists like Daryl would have a chance to speak, and folks who disagreed would have a chance as well, just to keep it real and interesting with opposing points of view represented, kind of like responsible journalism used to be before corporate sponsors chose the news and controlled the topics.
Looking through her passenger window as I cleaned and polished it, I saw Miss Pegi’s beautiful dashboard and instrument panel, her repurposed gauges illustrating electric energy levels. I marveled at how much less maintenance electric cars would need with their simple technology and reduced number of parts; no transmissions to adjust, no manual brakes to wear out, less to pay to gasoline stations. That servicing would all disappear with a future of bioelectric transportation.
Polishing the chrome above where her old tailpipe used to be, I could vividly remember the smell and soot that stained the ground whenever I started her up, leaving her very tangible carbon footprint behind. As I polished away, I was getti
ng intense, obsessing on ideas and starting to get into a big loop of repetition, feeling a bit angry about how hard it was for responsible people to change their lives and make their own choices. Why were today’s cars not smart enough to run on different fuels like Henry Ford’s Model T was? Why couldn’t they analyze the fuel that was on board and adjust carburetion for that fuel with twenty-first-century sensors and computers? People need freedom to choose at the pump.
I got a new rag and dipped it in the chrome polish.
I was polishing feverishly, almost removing the chrome as I obsessively tackled it, thinking to myself: If you don’t use a fossil fuel in your car or truck today, the warranty will be invalidated. There was one exception; flex-fuel (E85) vehicles, but it was practically impossible to find flex fuel on the freeway system. A Big Oil monopoly existed on the federal interstate system. Where was freedom of choice? Why couldn’t I buy an alternative fuel on the interstate? Where was the legislation to make a clean alternative available at all of those service areas along the federal highway system?
I did need to take a break from this thinking.
I was pleading to imaginary car dealers, “Please, someone sell me a great new car.”
Suppose I could buy a new car capable of burning different fuels that sent an email to the owner every month to say how it was doing: reporting CO2 emissions for the month based on the fuel it was using and driver habits and what service it needed. Why not send that email to the carbon tax division of the Energy Department, too? Tax CO2 emissions. Reward conservation. Charge for abuse. There are easy ways to determine whether the driver is being (a) responsible, (b) very responsible, or (c) abusive. Motivate drivers to use cleaner fuels and save the planet for our grandchildren with capitalism.
