I do buy gas, though, and it hurts these days. If I lived in the city, I might not own a car – I might just use public transportation or rent cars on the weekends. The advantages of living in the country are so great, however, that I couldn’t live anywhere else, and a car is therefore a necessity.

I remember as a kid in Wolfville getting on the Dayliner and riding the rails to Halifax, getting off at the Simpsons-Sears store on the outskirts. They’ve closed down the trains, including the one that used to run from Caledonia, which connected you to everywhere else. There are no busses. If you want to duck into the city to go to the theatre or restaurants or museums, you have to have your own car.

It seems quite bizarre that gas regulations mean that it costs more to buy gas in the country than it does in the city, when people in rural Nova Scotia require cars in order to move about, while those in the city have the luxury of a choice. That was why, some weeks ago, I wrote a piece about electric cars, thinking that if there were the will to produce electricity in ways that were not harmful to the environment, and the will to make cars that could run for long distances, we would all be better off.

That column was apparently reprinted in a digital journal called EVWorld (the EV stands for electric vehicle), in the United States, as I got an email from a person by the name of Ralph Steffin, who told me about a company in California successfully producing electric vehicles. I also heard from a Nova Scotian who had seen the article on EVWorld, who tried to establish a business in the Maritimes selling an electric tractor called the Electric Ox. His name was John Egan, of Advanced Power Products Ltd., who said he wished his business had worked out better.

“It would be nice to make a living from a business that helps the world but as you well know, we have a lot of things going against us,” he said.

The company mentioned by Ralph Steffin is called Phoenix Motorcars, based in Ontario, California. It mass produces fully functional electric trucks and SUVs, totally run by battery, with a speed of up to 150 kilometres an hour carrying five passengers and a full payload. Its range is 160 kilometres per charge, which would get me to Liverpool and back but just barely to Halifax. It takes 10 minutes to recharge to 95 per cent capacity.

Phoenix is selling 500 vehicles this year, and expects to sell 6,000 next year. At the moment the company is attempting to break into the market in a big way by going after fleet utility vehicle sales, which in California is a huge market. The potential beyond trucks, however, is vast.

I also received an email from Doug Miller, in Liverpool, who retired several years ago from the RCMP. He agreed that we would have to use electric or hydrogen powered vehicles in the not to distant future if we are to keep the parking lot in Liverpool from being submerged through global warming.

Doug wanted to make the point that it would be difficult for solar, wind and tidal power to provide the total amount of electricity required to charge all of the vehicle batteries on the road of the day. He felt that the answer was nuclear-generated electricity, which does not require the burning of any fossil fuel and which was safer than most people realized.

It has always bothered me to think of the Point Lepreau nuclear plant in nearby New Brunswick, given the nuclear accidents that have occurred in the past. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Doug said, “When one ponders the result of continuing to burn fossil fuels what other alternatives are reasonable?”

I notice that one of the last things Prime Minister Tony Blair is doing before he leaves office in the United Kingdom is putting on a push for developing several new nuclear generating stations. In the shorter term, before we build nuclear plants along the South Shore, we can cut into the numbers of vehicles using fossil fuels by many of us switching to electric vehicles, and using solar, wind and tidal energy to power those vehicles.

The intermediate step is reasonable and doable. I need more convincing on the nuclear option.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppar@ca.inter.net.