San Francisco Assemblyman Phil Ting would like for you to know that he has every intention of introducing new legislation in 2018 that will (i) make it much more difficult for low-income Californians to buy affordable vehicles and (ii) increase greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, Ting didn’t word it in exactly that way but his proposal to ban combustion-engine vehicles will inevitably result in both of the unintended consequences above.
As the Sacramento Bee points out this morning, Ting has promised to introduce his destructive legislation in January saying at some point you just need to “put a line in the sand.”
France and the United Kingdom are doing it. So is India. And now one lawmaker would like California to follow their lead in phasing out gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.
When the Legislature returns in January, Assemblyman Phil Ting plans to introduce a bill that would ban the sale of new cars fueled by internal-combustion engines after 2040. The San Francisco Democrat said it’s essential to get California drivers into an electric fleet if the state is going to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, since the transportation sector accounts for more than a third of all emissions.
“The market is moving this way. The entire world is moving this way,” Ting said. “At some point you need to set a goal and put a line in the sand.”
“California is used to being first. But we’re trying to catch up to this,” Ting said.
Meanwhile, we suspect that Ting will ignore the fact that California’s previous attempt to push electric cars on consumers has been a complete failure…presumably because people would prefer to not spend way more for a car that has half the performance of a gas car and doubles their electricity bill…just a hunch.
California already committed five years ago to putting 1.5 million “zero-emission vehicles,” such as electric cars and plug-in hybrids, on the road by 2025. By that time, the state wants these cleaner models to account for 15 percent of all new car sales.
But progress has been modest so far, as consumers wait for prices to drop and battery ranges to improve, or opt for large trucks and SUVs that are not available among electric offerings. Slightly more than 300,000 zero-emission vehicles have now been sold in California, and they accounted for just under 5 percent of new car sales in the state in the first half of the year.
On the upside, Ting’s proposed ban on gas vehicles would come a full 10 years later than the timeline floated by Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board last week. Per Bloomberg:
Governor Jerry Brown has expressed an interest in barring the sale of vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines, Mary Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, said in an interview Friday at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. Brown, one of the most outspoken elected official in the U.S. about the need for policies to combat climate change, would be replicating similar moves by China, France and the U.K.
“I’ve gotten messages from the governor asking, ‘Why haven’t we done something already?’” Nichols said, referring to China’s planned phase-out of fossil-fuel vehicle sales. “The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California.”
California has set a goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. Rising emissions from on-road transportation has undercut the state’s efforts to reduce pollution, a San Francisco-based non-profit said last month.
“To reach the ambitious levels of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we have to pretty much replace all combustion with some form of renewable energy by 2040 or 2050,” Nichols said. “We’re looking at that as a method of moving this discussion forward.”
“There are people who believe, including who work for me, that you could stop all sales of new internal-combustion cars by 2030. Some people say 2035, some people say 2040,” she said. “It’s awfully hard to predict any of that with precision, but it doesn’t appear to be out of the question.”
Of course, the irony that seems to be lost on Phil Ting, Jerry Brown and Mary Nichols is that, according to Morgan Stanley, electric cars generate more CO2 than they save. As a stark reminder to our left-leaning political elites who created companies like Tesla with massive subsidies, Morgan Stanley pointed out that while electric cars don’t burn gasoline they do have to be charged using electricity generated by coal and other fossil fuels.
This is where Tesla, along with China’s Guoxuan High-Tech fall short.
“Whilst the electric vehicles and lithium batteries manufactured by these two companies do indeed help to reduce direct CO2 emissions from vehicles, electricity is needed to power them,” Morgan Stanley wrote. “And with their primary markets still largely weighted towards fossil-fuel power (72% in the U.S. and 75% in China) the CO2 emissions from this electricity generation are still material.”
In other words, “the carbon emissions generated by the electricity required for electric vehicles are greater than those saved by cutting out direct vehicle emissions.”
Morgan Stanley calculated that an investment of $1 million in Canadian Solar results in nearly 15,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide being saved every year. For Tesla, such an investment adds nearly one-third of a metric ton of CO2.
Meanwhile, despite Brown’s desire for “Hope & Change,” even the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that “renewables” will represent less than 20% of electricity generation in the U.S. by 2040.
Oh well, when Ting succeeds it making it impossible for low-income California families to afford cheap transportation to work, we’re sure he’ll be all too happy to introduce additional legislation deeming electric cars to be a “right” of all U.S. citizens and mandating that “millionaire, billionaire, private jet owners” pay more in taxes to subsidize that “constitutionally protected right.”
via http://ift.tt/2xGQMlb Tyler Durden