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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

Because the benefits of the subsidy are disproportionately given to companies that exhaust federal subsidies. And Tesla will be the only one to do that for some time.

EV's don't make good sense "economically" for California yet. It's not unreasonable to wait until battery costs come down so mass adoption comes naturally.

They do make sense environmentally, but there is a far better way to compensate them for the actual value of their environmental benefit rather than a politically decided subsidy. California is already discussing doing it's own Cap and Trade market. Instead of subsidizing "zero emission" cars, it creates a market cost for carbon emissions, and raises the prices of gas engined cars, and not just newly purchased cars, all cars.

And it's fair, if your Tesla gets all of it's electricity from coal fired plants, you'll pay your fair share for that plants emissions.

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>It's not unreasonable to wait until battery costs come down so mass adoption comes naturally.

But how will battery costs come down if no one invests in it? You sound like the people in my country, forever waiting for the price of wind turbines to drop.

The Danish, German and Dutch government handed out massive subsidies for the first wind parks. Now, because of those subsidies, subsequent wind turbine parks can be built without any subsidies.

But that would've never been possible without those initial investments.

How did light bulbs ever become cheap enough to use without anyone using them? It's called research and development. Throwing out subsidies for specific technologies helps those technologies develop faster, but doesn't necessarily help the best technologies succeed. President Grant might have funded better technologies for getting more whale oil.

Just putting in a cap and trade system makes carbon neutral power generation much more attractive. But it doesn't pick the winners, and maybe some technology you and I are skeptical of turns out to be far better than the others.

> How did light bulbs ever become cheap enough to use without anyone using them?

They didn't, which is why adoption was gradual.

Had there been a concern for a major global environmental catastrophe which more rapid adoption of electric lighting would help stave off, public subsidies to encourage adoption and accelerate development might have made sense.

There is no guarantee that battery costs will come down naturally. The point of the subsidy is to help drive demand long enough so that the market forces have time to work on bringing those costs down. And even then, there is no guarantee that this will work. But batteries are a critical technology for many reasons (particularly the grid), so it makes sense to target this technology specifically. Look at what the CSI program did to CA's solar industry for an example of how fast a well planned incentive program can bootstrap an industry.

Also, CA already has a cap and trade program (a bill just passed to extend the program another 10 years). It has been around since 2012.

I don't understand why there's a need for complex cap and trade schemes to deal with carbon emissions from vehicles when there is a perfectly simple way of adding a cost to driving a carbon-emitting vehicle. Just add more taxes to gas. Taxing the vehicles unfairly punishes people who drive gas vehicles but organize their life in such a way that they don't need to drive many miles. Who is more environmentally friendly, someone who drives 60 miles per day in a vehicle that gets 60 miles per gallon or someone who drives 10 miles per day in a vehicle that gets 20 miles per gallon? For that matter, electricity isn't 100% renewable, even in CA, so even people driving fully-electric vehicles will also have some carbon impact, which should be, likewise, taxed. Carbon emissions are an externality and we should be treating them as such.

Taxing vehicle sales and offering subsidies are dumb ways to incentivize reducing environmental impact. Instead, just tax that environmental impact directly and don't punish people who figure out how to live environmentally friendly using older, less environmentally friendly technology. People and companies will adjust their behavior accordingly. As a bonus, instead of costing the state billions, the state will collect billions, so they can spend the money building out renewable energy infrastructure, planting trees, creating more state parks and other programs that benefit the environment.

Carbon taxes are imperfect solutions because you don't where to set the tax at. A good cap and trade market will find the right price, and even better, it should use the same price to compensate people for building carbon sinks, ie. planting trees, etc.

It's really unlikely we can get anywhere near the reductions we need simply by limiting carbon emissions, returning lots of carbon from the air into sinks likely can be far cheaper than stopping the last X% of emissions.

What about the carbon emissions in order to manufacture the car, dig up mines for lithium etc? Surely that needs to be accounted as well.

That's what a well designed cap and trade system should do.

> EV's don't make good sense "economically" for California yet.

Presumably, the scare quotes around “economically” are recognition that this argument is based on ignoring emissions-related externalities, management of which is almost the entire cited premise of the bill.

You are exactly right. I'm just saying that having a market set the price like cap and trade should do is far more efficient.

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