Darbonne: The Tesla, the Airport, a Scandal and a Swimming Pool

“I captured me one of them environmentalists,” goes a joke I heard recently.

In the story, Charles, who was at a Permian Basin well pad, phoned Chuck, who could hear Charles’ partner Charlie laughing in the background.

“You did what?” a shocked Chuck responded.

“I captured me one of them environmentalists!” Charles repeated excitedly, thrilled by his prowess.

“Why’d you do that?” Chuck asked, while hurriedly processing all the different legal ramifications of what Charles has done as well as his own duty to see that the hostage is freed.

Charles said, “He drove up onto the well pad and I captured him. Blocked him in!”

To simply say “Let him go” isn’t going to work. Chuck’s running through a mental deck of oilfield psychology. He draws a wildcard.

“Well, how do you know he’s an environmentalist?” Chuck asked.

Charles replied, “He’s driving a Tesla!”

Chuck had been pranked.

But if the Naïve Bayes classifier worked, one probability could be that the Tesla was the only vehicle left on the rental lot. And the battery was nearly dead.

The guy was just looking for an e-frac to plug into.

Hemingway might title this story “The Lost Man and the EV” or “A Farewell to Charge” or “For Whom the Battery Tolls.”

At Houston airports, an EV fill-up is free—when able to find an open EV slot.

This summer, finding any kind of open parking spot is difficult. Garages and economy lots were nearly full the first week of June, according to the Houston Airport System’s online real-time count.

And it’s not just in Houston: U.S. air travel this summer is setting new records, according to Transportation Security Administration data. The June 6 count of TSA screenings went up to 2.82 million passengers, up 27% from the 2.22 million who went through checkpoints on 2023’s first Thursday of June.

It also exceeded the pre-pandemic volume, 2.62 million, for that date in 2019.

An early indicator of this summer’s travel season came the Friday of Memorial Day weekend: 2.95 million screenings—the most ever on any day—TSA reported.

None of the air travel was with an EV.

But there was big geology news this spring: An International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) committee voted against demarcating the current Holocene epoch as having ended in the mid-20th century.

It would have resulted in naming the start of a new one, the Anthropocene epoch—a time when humans are affecting Earth.

The IUGS’ Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted 4-12 against it in March.

It didn’t go without scandal. “Eleven of those who voted, including 10 of the ‘no’ votes, were ineligible to do so because they had exceeded their term limits,” Yale’s School of the Environment reported at its e360 site.

“When the chair and a vice chair of the SQS objected, they were removed from executive duties.”

Meanwhile, at press time, a remarkable human feat was completed: turning an NFL field into an Olympics tryouts swimming pool. The work was done in three weeks on the Indianapolis Colts’ field at Lucas Oil Stadium for Team USA trials that were scheduled for June 15-23.

The competition pool and two warm-up ones hold some 2 million gallons of water sourced from a nearby river.

It’s unlikely the job was done by an EV.