Opinion | The California War Is About EVs
"A rational person’s reaction might be, so what? The auto industry claims that, unless California and the Trump administration resolve their differences on fuel-economy standards, car makers will be forced to build two sets of cars for the U.S. market. Don’t believe it. Car makers would mostly just raise the price of their pickups to make sure they sold fewer in California and covered their fuel-economy fines. They would also cut the price of their electric and other low-emission cars to make sure they sold more of them. And on the upside, voters in California and 13 other states that have adopted California’s rules would have to confront the cost of political decisions made in their name." What are those political decisions? "The real fight here is about something else. For California, it’s about holding onto a 50-year-old federal waiver to set its own clean-air standards. No political bureaucracy willingly surrenders such a power once it has it. For the car industry, the fight is for financial survival amid a global regulatory push for electric vehicles, which the Trump administration obstreperously has declined to play along with. For starters, you would be misled by focusing on conflicting fuel-mileage targets. The Obama administration originally touted a goal of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The Trump administration revised this to 37 mpg. A California compromise announced last month sets a target of 50 mpg by 2026. More relevant are the buried details that disguise the real business here: how the cost of subsidizing electric cars will be shifted onto buyers of gasoline-powered vehicles. By a widely accepted estimate, the Obama rules would have come closer to a real-world 40 mpg rather than the touted 54.5 mpg—the difference being a variety of credits (spelled out in 600 pages of dense Federal Register prose) devised to encourage auto makers to design and build electric cars and dump them on consumers at a loss." The real issue is whether California will be able to keep forcing the poor and middle classes to subsidize the EV toys bought by the rich. So, what is the actual outcome of these rules? "And the climate? It says, so what? None of this is going to matter significantly because neither improving fuel mileage of cars nor switching them to electric power would make more than a trivial dent in global CO2 output." These rules are a joke at best and a fraud at worst. "Here’s how we got here: Auto makers strongly supported the incoming Trump team’s plan to revisit what all understood were deliberately unrealistic Obama targets. The industry, however, wanted the out-year targets lowered in backdoor fashion by doling out more credits for electric cars. Why? Faced with large EV mandates in China and Europe and knowing they will face them again in the U.S. when Democrats are back in charge, they seek consistent regulatory incentives around the world in hopes of achieving economies of scale to keep their EV losses manageable." Again back to the baseline truth, the poor and the middle class are being forced to subsidize these EV toys for the wealthy, California is all in, so are the Democrats, Trump is not. The auto manufacturers don't much care provided they get the necessary subsidies from the poor and middle classes to help make the EV toys attractive to the wealthy. "A saner target for emissions cutting would be those giant sources that run 100% of the time, such as base-load electricity generation and industrial heat production. Even more so because whatever fuels our power plants also fuels our electric cars. The obvious solution here is nuclear, assuming a solution is needed, but only if and when the green movement can get over its own internal schisms on this subject. Of course, I’m vaporing. There is no chance of reason entering this unfriendly arena. To an obstinate part of the electorate, the car remains a sinful object. The great chemistry experiment in the atmosphere will go on very little affected by government policies to reward this or that technology. In the meantime, lots of taxpayer and consumer money can and will be squandered on special interests while having no effect on climate." The progressive cult will have none of this. Cars are sin, and you must repent your sins. It's a cult. A deadly secular cult. Time to shut it down and move on.
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