Captain Lockyer: I may have been misinformed. I understood Mr. Lafitte was in command in Barataria
Jean Lafitte: If you’re offer is good it will stand up under fire.
The Buccaneer 1958
I usually don’t pay attention to what is trending on twitter but when I saw “Mr. Bean” trending it jumped out at me. I presumed something had happened to comedy legend Rowan Atkinson so I clicked over.
Atkinson’s comedy has been making people laugh for decades. His TV series from the Thin Blue Line and Not the Nine O’clock news are guaranteed to raise a smile and his characters have been iconic from the incredible Edmund Blackadder, to Secret Agent Johnny English. He even did one Doctor Who parody titled “The curse of fatal death” that was a spot on sendup of the series.
But of all the characters he has played the most iconic is Mr. Bean. The simple and to some degree simple minded fellow who tries very hard to get by in this crazy world of ours. It is the role he is most identified with.
Atkinson is also known to be outspoken on free speech and comedy defending both while others run and hide and has never been shy about his opinions. Six months ago he wrote the following op-ed on the subject of Electric Cars:
I love electric vehicles — and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.
Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV. There are sound environmental reasons not to jump just yet.
Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.
I must admit that I was not aware of his background in engineering as you don’t see a lot of actors with this type of degree but it shows in this piece where he brakes down both the advantages and limits of current electric cars and brings up a subject that those pushing the cars (and getting rich off of subsidies) don’t mention:
In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70 per cent higher than when manufacturing a petrol one.
How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of ten years.
It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.
He doesn’t bring up the fires and the cost of repair which are rather significant but he does note that better alternates are on the drawing board from solid state batteries to Hydrogen models but that in the meantime we end up with a lot of bad batteries left over. He then pivots to another point, usage:
Currently, on average we keep our new cars for only three years before selling them on, driven mainly by the ubiquitous three-year leasing model.
This seems an outrageously profligate use of the world’s natural resources when you consider what great condition a three-year-old car is in.
When I was a child, any car that was five years old was a bucket of rust and halfway through the gate of the scrapyard. Not any longer. You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years.
It’s sobering to think that if the first owners of new cars just kept them for five years, on average, instead of the current three, then car production and the CO2 emissions associated with it, would be vastly reduced.
And he closed with this bit of advice:
Friends with an environmental conscience often ask me, as a car person, whether they should buy an electric car. I tend to say that if their car is an old diesel and they do a lot of city centre motoring, they should consider a change.
But otherwise, hold fire for now. Electric propulsion will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn.
Read the whole thing, it’s a good solid argument that is made from the climate change perspective.
Well apparently the folks in Britain who have known and loved Mr. Atkinson for decades have taken his argument to heart and that’s made some folks very mad
Pols and pressure groups are not amused:
The Lord’s environment and climate change committee has since been told the actor was partly to blame for ‘damaging’ public opinions on electric vehicles (EVs).
It comes as new petrol and diesel cars are due to be banned from 2035 under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak‘s net zero strategy – a plan designed to encourage drivers to buy EVs.
The Green Alliance pressure group said: ‘One of the most damaging articles was a comment piece written by Rowan Atkinson in the Guardian which has been roundly debunked.’
What seems to be the problem is that Mr. Atkinson made a solid rational argument concerning the actual goal our green friends supposedly have, that is reducing Co2 emissions and our green friends don’t seem to have any counter other than claiming it to be “debunked” which sound a lot like the vaccine companies talking when people were warning about the side effects of the shots.
The New article has this handy dandy graphic that makes Atkinson’s point for him
And again, note that Atkinson didn’t talk about things he could have brought up. High Cost, Limited Range, Lack of Charging stations, performance in cold, repair cost, battery fires or even the human cost of the child slave labor to get the lithium.
Bottom line if they have a better and more rational argument rather than just an agenda to push there are certainly a whole lot of other prominent lefty stars out there that the public would trust who could deliver it for them.
If they had one that is.
If not much easier to blame Mr. Atkinson for raining on their gravy train.
