I read where, starting in 2035, you won’t be able to buy a new gas powered car in California. Personally I don’t care because it doesn’t affect me, but I do find the larger, big picture issue, very interesting.
One thing I didn’t see are plans for new power plants to provide all this additional electricity. California has experienced rolling brown outs in the past and probably will continue to do so, so where is all this new power going to come from. Does anyone think they’re going to have sufficient capacity in green energy plants to handle the demand by then? I guess that’s possible, but I still haven’t seen anything that indicates renewables can replace 100% of fossil fuels.
On a related matter, I saw where there was a provision in this so called “Inflation Reduction Act” that provides hundreds of millions of dollars to a Canadian electric car manufacturer. Not sure what that has to do with reducing inflation, but it did get me thinking about what the end game is behind this push for electric cars.
It’s beginning to look a lot like the low hanging fruit that politicians can point to as evidence that they’re working diligently to protect us. And it does kind of remind me of the low hanging fruit they used as their solution to the problem with the hole in ozone.
The low hanging fruit on that one was banning CFC, which is fine, but that hole in the ozone is still there.
They talk about how electric cars are becoming more affordable, and that’s fine, but what they don’t talk about is how much those electric cars are going to cost to operate. Not just in the cost of electricity, but in the cost of registering and paying usage taxes to operate those vehicles.
Right now, in Hawaii, registering an electric car costs 75 dollars, last year I paid over 500 dollars to register my truck. They also don’t pay the 49 cents per gallon gas tax here. That’s where all the money supposedly comes from to maintain the roads. Imagine what the sticker shock will be for those driving their electric cars when that bill comes due. But by then, it will be too late.
And to top it all off, still no pressure on the two largest polluters, India and China (although China has announced a program to build over a hundred nuclear plants in the coming years) to reduce their emissions.
In the end, I think it will be like the hole in the ozone, a minimalist solution for public consumption, but in the same way that hole in the ozone is still there, the climate will continue to change, just as it always has.