It’s ironic that the state which birthed and came to define the car culture – cruising on Friday nights, the Beach Boys, Ronnie and the Daytonas – has become the state most hostile toward them.
No more little GTOs really looking fine or little Deuce coupes. Hell, no more Hyundais . . . unless they’re battery powered.
Under the terms of a fatwa crafted by Phil Ting – a member of the California General Assembly from San Francisco – the only new vehicles which will be legal for use on California roads beginning in 2040 will be “clean” vehicles.
“Clean” defined in interestingly incoherent – and arbitrary – terms.
Ting isn’t talking about the actually dirty byproducts of internal combustion – almost all of which have been sequestered and never leaves the tailpipe. That’s been true for decades. He is talking about carbon dioxide, which has become the commie-under-the-bed of our era.
C02 is a gas (and an inert gas) but hardly dirty. It doesn’t foul the air; it doesn’t make it harder to breath. It is a naturally occurring component of the atmosphere – and if it is “dirty” then so are oxygen and nitrogen.
But C02 is the one impossible to sequester byproduct of internal combustion – which gives it value as the unanswerable trump card of those who need a pretext for banning the cars which they loathe.
This includes electric cars.
One wonders whether Ting groks this – or is just another useful idiot.
EVs do not produce C02, of course. But the utility plants which produce the electricity which makes them go certainly do. Unless powered by nukes (can’t have that) or unicorn farts or Zero Point energy out of the vacuum – neither of which are online yet or foreseeably.
So if the object of the exercise is to cork up sources of C02, won’t those dirty coal and oil-fired utility plants have to be corked, too? And if they are corked, where will millions of “clean” electric cars obtain the electricity they need to make them go?
Ting says:
“Until you set a deadline, nothing gets done . . . it’s responsible for us to set a deadline 23 years in advance.”
Responsible?
Assuming you buy into the shibboleths, particularly the one about carbon dioxide being “dirty” and the alleged – and allegedly catastrophic – effects on the planet resulting from fractional increases in atmospheric concentrations of C02.
Leave that aside for a moment.
