> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # No charge? That’s no good - URL: https://www.smdp.com/no-charge-thats-no-good-20061130/ - Published: 2006-11-30T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T23:11:33.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Events, Sunset Park, #archive-import *A quiet confidence* *By JESSICA ROBERTS Special to the Daily Press* SUNSET PARK — He has a life story punctuated by news events. He was in fourth grade in San Antonio when President Kennedy was shot.His parents worked on the NASA Apollo program when he was in junior high school. His first week living in Los Angeles was when the Monica Lewinsky story broke. He got married one month after Sept. 11, 2001. Now, Paul Scott is a factor in news events, working to bring electric vehicles back from the edge of destruction through protests and road blocks that have been covered by CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and NPR. As a key part of this year’s documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” he may even become a recognizable face around Santa Monica. But for now, Scott enjoys going to Peet’s on Main Street, playing chess at the Farmer’s Market and going to the beach with friends... a relative unknown just trying to save the world. He’s a marathoner, a cancer-survivor and a photographer. He works for a computer animation company, which he calls his “day job,” but his passion is a fight to bring electric cars back to the American consciousness. Scott’s house is solar-powered and he has been driving an electric vehicle for years. Now, he wants to share them with the rest of the country. “You realize, OK, all of your electricity for your house and your car comes from sunlight, so there’s no pollution,” he said. “And your car runs on sunlight. You’re not going to gas stations. I haven’t been to a gas station in four years. So it hits you that this is the solution to a lot of problems.” Scott recently took time out from his busy activist life to recharge and chat with the Daily Press. Why do you think electric cars are so important? “This is the solution to the problem of spending hundreds of billions of dollars for foreign oil, the fact that we’re funding the terrorists with our oil money, the fact that we’re polluting our skies, global warming. It’s a solution to all of those things. The noise, the freeway, you hear that. With electric cars, they’re silent, so all the noise in the community goes down.” How did you get involved with the electric car movement? “A week \[after buying the car\], the car companies — all of them — stopped making cars. And they were crushing them. They were destroying the cars. And those of us who had the cars were saying, no you can’t do this! “We started writing letters to the Air Resources board to make them stop this. We got on ABC World News Tonight. We got on NPR. We started organizing these big protests.” What about the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” — how did you become part of that? “There was this guy, Chris Paine, who had an \[electric vehicle\]. He was showing up with a video camera, videotap-ing everything. He said,‘Yeah, I’m making a documentary on this, I’m really pissed off.’ We said, ‘We’ll let you know when we’re doing any protests.’ So we started working with him.” Have you become a celebrity yet? “We’re on one of those buses \[at Sundance\] and it’s packed and I’m standing there and a guy sitting in front of me looks up at me and I notice he’s staring at me, so I look at him and he says,‘After tonight, everybody’s going to know who you are.’ I said,‘Who are you?’ He said,‘I’m Chris, I edited the film.’” What was the reaction to the film at Sundance? “People laughed, people cried, people got pissed off. You get those kind of emotions in a film and that’s a good film. It’s fun to be associated with a film that’s that good. As EV advocates, we have this job — our job is to get cars into showrooms so people can have a choice, to buy an electric car or a gas car, because we’ll know what they’ll choose. To have that powerful tool to show people is a phenomenal thing.” Where did you grow up? “I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952\. Didn’t live there very long. My first memories are in Memphis, and went through first and second grades there... I was in San Antonio when Kennedy was killed. Then moved to a little town in northern Alabama called Arab. My parents worked at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, which is 30 miles north, during the Apollo program, and they were testing the big Apollo rockets. I was in junior high school, this is the mid- ’60s, and from 30 miles away you could hear those Apollo rockets roaring. It was real exciting, that was the early days of the space program and everything was bright and cheery. The Beatles just came out, it was kind of fun.” How did you get into the environmental movement? “I was an Oregonian, became very politically active in the recycling movement and spent about 10 years working in that field. Working in recycling, essentially you’re a garbage man, you’re just on the good side of the garbage. So you have no self-esteem doing that. > “We had to go into it with a sense of humor.” “You just start to go, I feel good about it, but obviously \[other people\] don’t. And, of course, you make no money.” How did your career change after that? “After a while, I got my camera back out and said, I’m going to become a photographer again... and went out free-lancing. The first day, a guy told me about this computer animation company that had just started and they were looking for somebody to help them sell the stuff. It sounded interesting, this was 1986. “We ended up doing \[this project\] and all of a sudden I was the star of the office — I landed IBM corporate. It gave me courage to go beyond local advertisers and I started calling national sports networks and the teams themselves. We became one of the country’s top animation companies.” What was your impression of LA before you moved here? “I’d go into LAX and rent a car,drive around on the freeways and you don’t know where you are and it’s scary as hell, from a little town like Eugene. It’s very scary and totally intimidating.” What’s life like here? “I love Santa Monica. If you’ve got a good income and you own a place in Santa Monica, life is very good. There’s intellectuals here. There are very smart, creative people all over the place here. They come from everywhere in the world. And then you’ve got the beach and anything you want to do, it’s here. So life got really good.” How did you meet your wife, Zan? “I decided I really wanted to find somebody. I was 49 and I really wanted a relationship to be the final relationship. So I put an ad in the LA Weekly personals. “I sat down and wrote this really long thing and I described who I was and who I was looking for and I went into a lot of detail and I ended it with, ‘Do you still think you can make a difference in the world and do you want to?’ So I put that out there and I got eight responses. I talked to all eight of them on the phone. I had coffee with five of them. I dated three of them. I had sex with two of them. And married one of them. “She was a writer for the LA Times, just this perfect match. She really was.” How did you react to your operation for bladder cancer? “In July of ‘02, they said you might die. If the cancer comes back after we’ve done this operation there’s nothing we can do for you. “So it was like, what do you do? You’ve got to go forward. You can’t do anything but go forward, otherwise you might as well commit suicide. So I had all these friends and this great new life, a good job and life was really going well and then this happens. So we decided, let’s don’t make a big sad thing out of it. Let’s have a party instead. So we had a “Bye-bye Bladder” party, invited all of our friends. My wife and some of our friends made a cake in the shape of a bladder. We had catheter bags filled with apple juice and people brought over all these gifts. It was real fun. How did your life change? “During that period, I’m thinking, I put off so much in my life and I really wanted to do all this stuff. I don’t want to wait anymore. Zan said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘Well one thing is, I want to get solar.’ “During that research \[about solar power\], I came across this Web site where people are talking about electric cars. This is in fall of 2002\. I’m reading the posts and people are saying all these incredible things about these cars. So I ask one to come over and give me a test drive. I bought one the next day.” Have you seen any results from your activism? “The Tuesday after \[a second major protest at the Santa Monica Toyota dealership\], Toyota Corporate calls and says, ‘We want to talk, can you come in?’ So we go in, there’s five of us and two of them in a big boardroom. “We spent two hours in there with this guy — he’s a VP, he’s very high up, very smart, very smooth. And they gave us virtually everything we asked for. They stopped crushing the cars, they’re setting up a parts program, they would sell some of the leased cars, not all of them, but some of them. “We walked into the sunlight, we kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Holy sh--, that worked.’” What’s next for you and for electric cars? “The next goal is to get the car makers to build the cars. We morphed our name into ‘Plug in America.’ We started doing more lobbying and we became an advocacy group instead of a protest group.” Will average people like electric cars? “When people start driving electric cars, they’re never going to go back to gas. When you drive an electric car, it’s very powerful, it’s completely silent, and it runs on electricity you can make from sunlight. “You get a 120-mile range. Any new electric car will be able to charge from any plug.” How have you seen the country change during your life? “I’ve seen my country go from the good guys to the bad guys. Especially when Bush took over, he changed the country and he took advantage of people’s selfishness and greed and I saw that people started not caring about others as much and the greater good. They just didn’t care. It was like, how much can I get for me and screw what it does to anybody else. To me, you have to live according to your philosophy. I want the world to be a better place because I lived. If you live your life according to something like that, then you’ll do good. *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 30, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/113006.pdf?ref=smdp.com)