After she left her position as governor of Michigan but before she took her current job as President Joe Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm kept herself busy by, among other things, making a cameo in an anti-gas music video called “Gasoline, Gasoline (The World’s Aflame).”
Lip-syncing to a horrid song about how “fossil fools” were ruining the earth, Granholm backed an environmentalist group’s rhymed call to action to end our dependence on gasoline: “You took me for a ride, and now we’re lost / I’m choking on your pollution trip / You’re making me cough / You’re turning me off / I’m breaking this relationship.”
Turns out that, this past week, Granholm might have been pining for a fling with her old BF, petroleum.
According to NPR, the energy chief recently went on what she called the “people-powered summer road trip.”
Unless this really is “The Matrix,” it was actually powered by electricity, not people, but never mind that. Granholm drove through the southeastern U.S. in her electric vehicle, media in tow, showing people how a road trip in an EV works.
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Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.
Camila Domonoske, reporting for NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Wednesday, said that Granholm was in a Cadillac Lyriq, “a very nice electric vehicle.”
Quite nice, actually — with an MSRP close to $60,000 and a stated range of up to 314 miles.
“We are going from Atlanta to Chattanooga. So we are on our way. This trip has gone from Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s going through multiple states,” Domonoske said.
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“It’s all about bringing attention to these billions of dollars in funding that the Biden administration is spending for clean energy, for electric vehicle chargers, for the batteries that go into electric vehicles.”
She added that this part of the nation is being called the “Battery Belt” by “some people” (I have an idea that a lot of those people might be in the Biden administration) because of the number of EV manufacturing plants planned for the area.
“This is where people will be working to build electric vehicles to clean up our transportation system,” Granholm said in South Carolina. “Y’all should feel so proud that that is happening here, right?”
Domonoske said the tour “stopped at churches, college campuses, union halls, research labs and factories — all about this push towards clean energy.”
However, while “some parts went exactly according to plan — charging at the hotels and parking lots,” not even those stops at churches could curry favor with the Almighty in order to make it all go smoothly.
“The best-laid plans — I mean, anyone who has driven electric vehicles on road trips, especially if you’re not in a Tesla, is familiar with this experience,” Domonoske said.
“Yesterday, we stopped at a fast charger where one of the chargers was broken, right? … There were more people who wanted to charge than there were chargers.
“And one person who was waiting actually called the cops about a non-electric vehicle that was trying to hold a spot for the secretary of energy. Turns out that’s not a crime, the cops said who showed up. But it is a real frustration, and it just speaks to the challenges the existing infrastructure poses to people with electric vehicles,” Domonoske continued.
“And then another car pulled up. He couldn’t charge either. And that driver, John Ryan, he said, ‘Yeah, this is just totally normal.’”
Well, that’s humiliating. Quoth Mr. Ryan: “Just par for the course. I mean, they’ll get it together at some point, I guess.”
Um, just checking, sir: You do know this is the woman they’re counting on to help “get it together at some point,” right?
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Oh, and Pete Buttigieg. Him too. Sleep well, Chevy Bolt owners.
Fox News was less than impressed:
OMGAWD 🤣 pic.twitter.com/ovQBf2zC9v
— Karli Bonne’ (@KarliBonnita) June 29, 2023
But then, what do we expect? Even in areas with lots of electric vehicles, there have been substantial problems with keeping chargers operational.
A 2022 study found that over a quarter of the public chargers in the San Francisco Bay Area were broken in one way or another.
And when they’re not, things aren’t that much better:
US: A woman from Louisiana filmed a long line of Teslas waiting to charge their cars. It takes over an hour to charge each electric vehicle and the closest charging station is over 100 miles away. pic.twitter.com/eEM9mro1Ba
— Apex World News (@apexworldnews) March 17, 2022
The very rare time as a Tesla owner I wish I could pay $6/gallon for gas and be on my way. We need more super chargers @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/qmxbghkycO
— Ben Bergman (@thebenbergman) March 20, 2022
The “people-powered summer road trip” seems to have gone just as smoothly.
Sure, Granholm may have said “I’m breaking this relationship” with gas-powered vehicles. But you can’t tell me she wasn’t sending a few tipsy late-night texts after that charging debacle, asking what they were up to.
