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.
Here’s
Phil . . .
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 emit 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 does not say. Maybe because he has not thought.
He does say:
“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.
2040 is much closer than it sounds because the car companies –
like the Titanic – cannot turn on a dime. It takes years to
design a new car and get it ready for the marketplace. And the parameters for
new designs are based – these days – at least as much on regulatory fatwas as
on market trends.
For instance:
The marketplace hasn’t induced the car companies to “silent
recall” most of their six cylinder (and larger) engines – you may have noticed
this trend – and replace them with very small fours, very heavily boosted by
turbochargers, to recover the power lost by the physical downsizing of the
engines.
Nor has the marketplace demanded direct injected engines that
turn themselves off automatically every time the car rolls to a stop. Or
automatic transmissions with nine and ten speeds that provide no benefit to the
vehicle owner but plenty of liability – in the form of weird operating
characteristics (all that up and down shifting) and premature economic
obsolescence when they fail and the cost to replace them is disproportionate
relative to the worth of the car.
Nor easily-damaged and expensive-to-fix aluminum bodies.
Et cetera – and more to come.
These things have been put into production solely in
anticipation of the 54.5 MPG fuel economy fatwa that is
scheduled to go into effect beginning with the 2025 models.
If California – the largest single market for cars in the United
States – passes a law forbidding the sale of cars powered by internal
combustion beginning in 2040, the entire industry will have to make plans
on that basis as well.
And that will mean the abandonment of the internal combustion engine
long before the actual ban goes into effect. No point investing in new
engine (or transmission) technologies – which take years to develop, test and
make ready for production – when you know ahead of time that all your efforts
will simply be thrown away, including the millions (if not
billions) spent on R&D, tooling and so on.
If the California General Assembly actually passes this bill and
it is signed into law by Governor Moonbat – who has already expressed
enthusiasm – it will mean that the current crop of new cars will be the last generation
of new cars.
Of IC-powered new cars, at any rate.
There will be minor updates of the cars currently in production,
to keep them as fresh as feasible – but it would be economic suicide for a car
company to make any major investment in a technology that will no longer be
legal to sell in the biggest market in the country just a few product cycles
down the road from now. Particularly if other states follow California’s
example, which several probably will.
So the car industry will transition to “clean” electrics –
which aren’t.
Meanwhile, C02 will continue to be emitted – just not at the
tailpipe. Unless Ting, et alalso go after the smokestacks,
which they no doubt will. Which – absent the unicorn farts or Zero Point energy
pulled out of the vacuum – will mean the end of the EVs, too.
You are maybe beginning to see the picture.
. . .
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