OPINION: As I write this, feet on my desk, waiting for my office mates to arrive and start in on the proper work, I notice that there's a black smudge of oil on my leg.
It's not unusual. Most days, despite my good-for-a-bloke personal hygiene habits, there'll be a bit of engine oil somewhere on me or my clothes.
The reason is my (literally) dirty habit. At the weekends, and on weekdays if I can sneak off, I fly and fiddle with old, oily, petrol-burning aeroplanes. The newest was built in 1978; the oldest in 1953. There's even one I've just started to fly that was built in the 1930s.
The aeroplanes I fly aren't particularly big, fast, noisy or powerful. Some of the ones we hang out with are, though. At the weekend I flew in an airshow alongside Spitfires, a Focke-Wulf, a team of snarling Harvards and more Yaks than a Nepalese butcher's shop.
In three days of flying we used enough avgas (a 100-octane lightly-leaded version of what goes in your car) and engine oil to fuel the average Aucklander's commute for the next thousand years. And that's not counting the diesel that was literally poured into aircraft exhaust systems to make those oh-so-photogenic smoke trails.
In 2023, with the climate warming and humans, our machines and our livestock undeniably in the frame, I should feel at least a little guilty about it all.
But I don't.
There's no doubt that the tide against internal combustion engines is gathering pace. An EV was on my shopping list last time I bought a car, only the $20,000 price difference tipping me towards my magically efficient 1-litre ICE Volkswagen. I'm certain my next car will be electric. Small electric aircraft are just appearing on the scene, and if I need to fly domestically in 2035 the aircraft may well be electrically powered.
I'll still fly noisy oily petrol-burning aeroplanes at weekends though, and here's why:
Joy.
Every one of the thousands of families who visited the airshow over Easter weekend enjoyed it. The kids squealed. People clapped and cheered. There were literal oohs and aaahs from the crowd at what looked like the scary parts. More than one old bugger cried.
For some, the aeroplanes didn't even need to be airborne to be worth admiring. A rare and precious De Havilland Mosquito, plucked from a Māpua barn a few years back, attracted hundreds every time it ran its two V12 Rolls Royce Merlin engines. One exhibitor was even running engines without aeroplanes attached; beautiful locally-made reproductions of the very earliest WW1 fighter engines, castor oil lubrication and all.
It was joyous.
The pilots, a few dozen guys and girls aged from about 30 to north of 70, enjoyed ourselves too. Being upside down in a 75-year-old aeroplane dragged along by a clattering, smelly engine that looks like something from Thomas the Tank Engine is a unique pleasure.
When the 1953 engine I'm helping rebuild, currently in hundreds of gleaming pieces on my 83-year-old engineer's bench, coughs and then purrs to life, I'll be overjoyed and he will too (although he probably won't let on).
In 2023, if you're going to use fossil fuels at all, if you're going to increase your personal contribution to anthropogenic climate change, joy is one of the few defensible reasons to do it.
Driving a three-litre petrol truck to pick up some groceries, drop off the kids or occupy half the space a bus would on your motorway commute makes no sense.
We've seen this exact shift before. Horses were once the smelly, dangerous, polluting scourge of big cities like New York, London and Paris. The internal combustion engine swept them away as a safer, seemingly cleaner alternative. Horses as a means of transport plodded on for a while, but before long the only reason anyone would keep one of the big, needy, dirty, expensive things was for joy.
And to me, and the motorbike tinkerers and steam train enthusiasts and V8 polishers in sheds, hangars and garages everywhere, that's as good a reason as there is.