On Thursday, the California Air Resources Board is expected to release a new proposal that will require all cars sold in the Golden State be 100% greenhouse gas emissions-free by 2035. This new rule—in the world’s 11th largest car market and the largest car market in the United States—is an enormous win for environmentalists and people who like breathing air. Conversely, it puts that much more pressure on the automobile industry to do what they should have done to update their cars and business model decades ago.
The New York Times reports that the new rule would also set “interim targets, requiring that 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold by 2026 produce zero emissions. That requirement climbs to 68 percent by 2030.” Coalition for Clean Air’s Bill Magavern told Sacremento affiliate KTXL: “This is going to do a lot to clean up the air in California and to fight the crisis that we have of air pollution and climate change.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters that this new rule would be the end of gas-powered cars. “Our kids are going to act like it’s a rotary phone, or changing the channel on a television.”
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Critiques of the plan from the fossil fuel industry offer up a lot of obstacle questions with no solutions of their own. Ann Bluntzer, the executive director of the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute at Texas Christian University, told the Times that just having electric cars and no additional sources of energy will stress out the electrical grid.
She’s not wrong, but ending fossil fuel dependency and changing the way we allow the pollution of our planet and communities for greed’s sake has never required a single-pronged solution. There will need to be further advocacy for upgrades to our infrastructure and how we develop our cities and communities. That’s what one might call the evolution of society.
Another criticism is that while Tesla’s electric vehicles have taken over more than 10% of the car market in California recently, they’re still wildly unaffordable. Magavern agrees but hopes that creating these requirements, along with the board’s proposed incentives to automobile makers to create more affordable clean-air vehicles, will expedite a process that has been a long time coming. “It’s easy for people that have enough wealth, but we need for this revolution to make its way to everybody and to give clean mobility for all Californians.”
California already has the nation’s largest electric vehicle market in the country with over 1.1 million vehicles registered. That comprises 43% of the nation’s plug-in vehicles.
Any direct regulation against the fossil fuel industry and its power is an uphill battle. However, California being a mostly blue state combined with recent support federally for the reduction of carbon emissions across the country give one hope that the scaffolding can be put in place for bigger and more essential changes that need to happen in order to create a modern world that isn’t a hellfire nightmare.
The president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, John Bozzella, offered up this set of excuses for why automobile manufacturers can’t get their act together: “Whether or not these requirements are realistic or achievable is directly linked to external factors like inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage.” The translation of that sentence is we haven’t figured out a viable business model that allows us to see increased quarterly profits at the same time.
The time is now. (Frankly, the time was about 50 years ago.) States and municipalities need to quickly take the federal money and political will we have right now and move forward. The next steps if this plan is approved will be for California to apply and receive a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency. The waiver needs approval because California’s new rule would be more ambitious than the federal law and could have far-reaching affects across the country in blue states working on enacting similar environmental laws and regulations.
You might remember that disgraced human being Donald Trump halted California’s Clean Air Act waiver the way a troll might steal a baby from a family in a nightmare. The Biden administration reestablished the waiver allowing California to take this important big swing. Seventeen Republican-led states are currently suing the Biden administration over its reinstatement of the waiver rule, saying it is unconstitutional.
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