This is a post about nothing at all. It’s about an odd little sound that some cars make. How that little sound currently marks the brethren (and sisteren) of environmental awareness. And how we manage to congregate exactly where you’d expect to find us.
The gathering
Today is quarterly recycling day here in the Town of Vienna. The Town throws open the gates of the Northside property yard and encourages citizens to bring in things that ought to be kept out of the landfill. Either toxics (e.g., used motor oil, waste electronics) or treasures (copper, aluminum, steel scrap).
It’s a big, brutal place. It’s where the Town parks its fleet of trash trucks, earth movers, and the like. There are sheds for storing road salt and similar industrial chemicals.
It’s not the backdrop where you’d naively expect to find a bunch of tree-huggers. And yet, here we are. Four times a year, it’s a place for Jane and Joe Citizen to drop off things that ought to be recycled outside of the standard curbside recycling stream.
I don’t normally participate. Not that I disagree with the concept, it’s that I normally have little to contribute. But I’ve been on a rampage to clear out my junk, so I had some mass to throw in this year.
These days, I don’t so much recycle as avoid buying in the first place. But this was mostly a remnant of the old me. No matter. Here I was, with my tiny offering to the earth gods. /goddesses. /Why do Gods have to have gonads anyway?
No matter.
By their mark you shall know them.
Here in the Commonwealth, the mark of the proudly environmentally insensitive asshole citizen is the Tea Party Plate. To me, it looks like a plate from Pennsylvania. Yellow and blue. Nothing to do with Virginia.
You will see it used exclusively on manly low-mpg-vehicles. Which I see at the Safeway. As I do my manly grocery shopping. A lot of F250s (and up!) being used as grocery-getters.
In theory, that plate is supposed to be a statement about political freedom, or something. But empirically, if one of those has ever been attached to a vehicle with better than 30 MPG rating per the EPA, that’s news to me. Empirically, it marks people who are proud to burn liquid fuels, and lots of them.
Edit: See Post #1589 for a correction to the statements above.
I don’t know why. The (Ben) Franklin stove was invented to conserve wood. Republican T. Roosevelt made the push to conserve natural resources more generally. Nixon, fer God’s sake, saw the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, that begat the EPA. How maximizing your consumption of fossil fuels came to be a virtue among Republicans remains a puzzle to me. Let alone among Americans in general.
By their sound you shall know them.
Which finally brings me to what actually happened today. Put aside the personal virtue aspect of this. (Thanks, Dick Cheney). I spent the morning breaking up old crap into salvageable metals and waste, then delivering the metals for recycling.
Yay, me.
On my first trip — aluminum — I noted the guy pulling out of the recycling area, as I was pulling in, was driving a Tesla. And I thought, well, if I’m hanging with the Teslerati, I’m upscaling it. I sure as hell can’t afford to shop where those people shop. Nice that I’m dumping my high-end recyclables in the same bin as the Tesla drivers.
But on my second trip — steel, copper, and waste oil — I finally saw the light.
Or, rather, heard it.
But to get it, you have to be in on the joke. As of the 2021 model year, any car that is capable of moving without the gas engine running is required to make a noise. (I actually fought against this legislation, long ago, but that’s another story). This rule was championed by advocates for the blind, who noted that the silent operation of EVs (and similar) at low speed was a hazard to the blind (and similar).
And so now, all of the bretheren and sisteren — EV, PHEV, and hybrid — we all make a noise. And if you’re of the Toyota clan, we all make the same noise. Universally described as the space ship noise. Engineered to catch your attention, but not as obnoxious as the OSHA-mandated backup beep.
So here’s the punchline. As I was driving in to deliver my ferrous scrap, I heard the space ship noise, from the last person that was driving out. Then I backed in, and there was my space ship noise. And as I was driving out, there was another Prius Prime backing in — accompanied by the space ship noise.
Never heard that before. A gathering of the space ships.
The point of this is correlation. The correlation between folks willing to participate in this community hard-core recycling event. And folks driving cars that economize on the consumption of fossil fuels.
Birds of a feather. And, more importantly, reinforcement. So screw you if you’re too stupid or lazy to recycle. Plenty of my fellow recyclers are willing to go the extra mile. I know them by the sound they make.
