California to Require All New Vehicles Be Zero-Emission by 2035
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This move feels radical, but I don't see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we're on we'll just sleepwalk into oblivion.
Why is this plant shutting down? Not because of some sort of hate of nuclear technology, as many would have us believe.
No, the real reason this plant is shutting down is because, like every other thermal generation plant, extending its lifetime past the original license means complying with environmental impact laws on waste heat. Once-through waste heat systems are no longer legal [1]. So why not just build a waste heat system and keep it running? Because when the utility tried to come up with one, the cost of the cooling system alone ran into the billions of dollars!
Much better to just by a few billion dollars worth of batteries and site them on location. At current costs, today, $1B gets you 5GWh at 1.25GW, roughly. The very cheapest estimate for a cooling system was $7B and they ran to over $10B for a new cooling system [2]. So even without the inevitable cost overruns, one could purchase 35-50GWh and 9-12GW of batteries.
A 40GWh/10GW battery would be a far better grid asset for California, and massive increase reliability far beyond what Diablo Canyon could ever produce.
When the mere cooling system for nuclear is more expensive than a better battery, the technology is dead, dead, dead. We don't need it and we have better alternatives.
[1] https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
[2] https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ocean/c...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
It's supported by the official 2020 Democratic Party platform: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...
Renewables (as well as storage) have reduced in cost (and continue to reduce in cost) much faster than has been expected by groups like the EIA.gov. While I fully support nuclear of all sorts, it's likely not to have a massive impact beyond the ~19% of electricity it provides today. It just takes too long to build, and proving a new design that'd be faster to build would also take a while, so it'd be supplemental to the energy transition, not the primary power source.
This is much different from 20 years ago when even wind power was still much more expensive than it is today, when off-shore wind was an expensive science project, when solar was literally over 10x (EDIT: more like 20x) the price as well as battery storage. At that point, yeah, I would've agreed nuclear was our only option for a rapid transition.
IMO the biggest problem with nuclear is the cost and time to construct. I don't think the energy industry would be so keen to shut them down if they were cost effective.
There is plenty of energy in renewables that is far cheaper and safer than nuclear.
Diablo Canyon is over 50 years old. It's not considered a particularly safe design. Stretching a few more years out of it isn't going to make a significant impact, certainly not relative to the auto regulation under discussion.
I mean, look, sure. I "support" extending Diablo Canyon in principle. But that takes a ton of money, and I'd like to see numbers showing that isn't better spent on a bunch of wind farms.
My understanding is that, at least depending on your goal, this isn't nearly radical enough. Some experts think we not only need to stop selling gas-powered cars _immediately_, but also actively remove existing fossil fuel cars/appliance from the economy.
I found this podcast helpful in understanding the level of effort needed to decarbonize in the near future: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/8/27/21403184/saul-griffit...
Unless there's actual measurable promises made by politicians that can be falsified before their next election, it's mostly puffery. Make hard, publicly verifiable 6, 12, and 18 month commitments otherwise it's just fluffy words to get votes.
Also this can't be a politics-only solution. We have to dip into ye olden term of "political economy" - that second term is integrally tied to the first. The restructuring has to happen at how the politics And economy operates otherwise it doesn't work - there's no way to do anything meaningful, it's just words on paper if we only look at politics.
Personally I think profit maximization for the energy sector has to go. It's not how we run our fire, parks, library, courts, postal service and it can't be how we do energy, at least not right now. Greenhouse gas minimization has to determine things.
It's possible. The best universities for instance, aren't determined by the highest profits and the best police aren't the ones that hand out the largest fines and the best parents aren't the ones that extract the highest value labor from their children. We can restructure how energy is done as well.
That's targeting the wrong side of the supply/demand equation. Which is also why this initiative of California's will not work.
Just keep building better power sources!! You will never reduce demand, you can only make a better supply.
Nuclear nuclear nuclear. There's nothing else that can do it fast enough.
If California actually cared about the environment that's what they would do, instead it's only lip service.
* 28%/41% - transportation
* 27%/15% - electricity
* 22%/24% - industry
* 12%/12% - commercial & residential
* 10%/ 8% - agriculture
58% of US transportation (~16% of the US total) is passenger cars and light-duty trucks, the focus of this announcement. CA accounts for about 6-7% of US CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalents), so this action targets roughly 1% of our national emissions, not nothing but certainly more symbolic than impactful (even considering spillover effects). electricity and industry must be tackled as well, coordinated among a majority of states.
the US, ~4% of the world's population, produces about 15% of the world's emissions (2nd to china, EU together is 3rd). this is why it's even more critical that the US, china and the EU especially come together on climate change (e.g., the paris accords) rather than giving the middle finger like we americans did recently.
[0]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas... [1]: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
I would guess CA would still have a very large number of ICE vehicles in 2060 with this legislation.
As a nation, we're not making radical moves. Most of our proposed policies are slow-walked or rolled back before they ever make a difference.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/824431240/trump-administratio...
400ppm is actually a level when it starts having measurable effects on humans (generally dumbs you down slightly).
Meanwhile, we are being pounded in Canada with extra taxes to discourage burning of fossil fuels even though we only emit 1.6% of the worlds GHG's. And a large part of that comes from home heating by natural gas, to which there is no viable alternative, so its not discouraging anything, its just another cash grab.
We can't make everyone happy and keep the world habitable for life as we know it.
The time to make tough decisions was yesterday at least this is better than tomorrow.
Plenty of other countries already discuss bans for 2030.
> This move feels radical, but I don't see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we're on we'll just sleepwalk into oblivion.
One of the most frustrating things for me in the global warming debate is the total lack of interest in the scientific truth on BOTH sides of the issue. The truly odd scenario it sets-up is one where both sides are, well, to be kind, confused.
It's weird, deniers don't know what they are talking about --because it is most-definitely real-- and advocates are confused because they are ignoring the most basic science on the subject.
What is the truth?
There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it. Plain and simple.
This is a planetary-scale problem that cannot be solved in thousands of years even if the entirety of humanity and our technology left this planet at once.
If we all left earth immediately, at best, it will take somewhere in the order of 50,000 to 100,000 years for atmospheric CO2 levels to come down by 100 ppm.
That's the truth. And it requires everyone leaving earth right away. A consequence of this is that no partial measure anyone can cook-up can even begin to make a dent. In fact, we have years-long research findings concluding that, even if we converted the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy not only would atmospheric CO2 not go down, it would continue to grow exponentially.
And yet everyone ignores the most basic of scientific analysis that confirms this reality. Scientists don't want to speak-up because it would mean losing grants and likely having their lives and careers destroyed. Nobody wants to go against something politicians and others are too happy to use to gain votes and make money. And so, the scientific truth is suppressed and lay-people believe nonsense.
OK, so, what is this simple analysis that proves this idea that it would take 50,000 to 100,000 years for CO2 levels to come down by 100 ppm if we all left earth?
We know EXACTLY how quickly natural processes reduce atmospheric CO2 through historical ice core sample records going back 800,000 years. In case it isn't obvious, this means we know the rate of change for a planet without humanity.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Take that graph into your favorite image editor and fit lines to it for the decline phase in every cycle. Measure the slope for each cycle. Take the average or median, your choice. The number is in the tens of thousands of years. Not hundreds. Tens of thousands.
Then read the paper and understand how a transition to clean energy is an exercise in futility.
I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm. No magic hand-wavy stuff. Whatever anyone proposes must include analysis of energy and resources needed to execute a planetary scale solution that is able to force a change at a rate up to a thousand times faster than the natural "no humans on earth" rate.
This is not to say there aren't a lot of good reasons to clean-up our act. There are. Of course. We just need to stop lying to ourselves, understand reality and start talking about how to adapt for the sake of future generations. We must also free-up our brilliant scientists so they can deal with this issue factually without fear for the destruction of their careers and loss of funding. The current path will lead nowhere. Converting California to all electric vehicles in the name of climate change is farcical at best and potentially detrimental.
There isn't anyone alive who can solve a scientific problem by ignoring evidence and data.
[citation needed]
Humans could never fly. We could never destroy entire mountains. We could never drain an entire sea or make an island. We could never split an atom. We could never walk on the moon. We could never have an international network sending live video around the world at near light speed. We could never burn so much fuel that we heat up the earth in a measurable degree.
Yet people did all of these things.
Just because it seems impossible now doesn't mean it won't be possible someday.
> I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm
If a single person right here, right now, could do that in an economical fashion, they'd be a trillionaire before the decade is over. Nobody in 2001 was single handedly making pocket-sized GPSes that played games, streamed video, and had AI facial recognition in the sub-thousand dollar price range either, but that changed fast. Anybody who proposed using solar panels and windmills as a main power source for cities in 1910 would've been called a kook just as well. It's incremental change.
I think you can get something like 3 tons of CO2 per acre per year with switchgrass. There's around 1 trillion excess tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Let's say we use around 200 million acres of land, that works out to:
(1 trillion tons / 3 tons per acre per year) / 200 million acres = 1512 years.
But that's just the US. If other countries help with land, we could probably get 1 or 2 billion acres involved, so that drops it to 150 years.
That's a lot, but not as bad as your picture.
Also you have to adapt to changing conditions and then take actions accordingly. This is true generally, and possibly even more so for politicians and governments.
The term "zero-emissions" is borderline BS when the energy is coming from a source that emits pollution way off in the distance. If I remember correctly, California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening, so it while it's nice that our cars won't be putting out smog someday, we aren't going to take climate change seriously unless we move to nuclear.
To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time. During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time. Nuclear can help solve that. Same with natural gas to electricity conversion(like what Bloom Energy does).
California has brought far more solar/ wind power online over the past 20 years than they've retired nuclear power plants. They are also slowly phasing out non-renewable power. Though the pace isn't as fast as many would like, it's happening.
> To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time.
For the typical 10,000-20,000 mile/ year driver, an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home. If you have even a small solar install—which makes tons of sense in California—the load on the grid is near zero.
The recent blackouts demonstrate that California doesn't have enough dispatchable power to support the current air conditioning footprint. We need to add more EVs and more air conditioning on top of that.
That's not much. $2 worth of electricity. And $3-4,000 worth of solar panels will produce that much a day. Compare that to the car that costs ten times as much.
Will most people be plugging in their cars during the day, though? Or will they be charging at night, at home?
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/1779909...
EDIT:
And on your second point, having a large number of electric vehicles may actually help smooth out load -- it's easier to temporarily throttle charging during peak load than it is to get everyone to turn off their air conditioning. Public charging stations, like Chargepoint, already do this.
You can even imagine a future where you could tell your car to discharge its battery to power your home during peak demand and then charge back up overnight when power is cheap and plentiful.
I just wish people would read about France, which despite their current stupidity, rolled out 34 reactors in something like 10 years back in the 1970's. Thereby not only going energy independent, but nearly 0 emissions. Now during the past decade or so, not only are they one of the cleanest (if not the cleanest) countries in the world, they have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and are also the largest net exporter.
So, if anyone in politics actually had a brain about this, they would drive a similar mandate through with a < 10 year time-frame, so that rather than powering all those batteries with natural gas, they would be carbon free.
But, no, in the USA that wont happen until we get to the point that all the 1d10t politicians (and their supporters) start starving due to food production problems or massive wars.
Really well actually, done correctly it will actually make power production cheaper per watt for everyone.
Since cars spend the vast majority of their time idle they can charge whenever. Whenever in this case being the middle of the night when the lack of workers causes power usage to bottom out.
The power companies would prefer a flat usage line and having cars that can intelligently start charging when ideal can totally help with that.
Additionally I would point out that while zero-emissions is a bit disingenuous electric cars are the only real path forward to zero-emissions. The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.
That said cars and the infrastructure needed to support them requires enormous amounts of resources, EV's don't change that much. But what what are you going to do?
On the other hand for California zero emission also means no NOx, SOX and PM2.5 tail pipe emissions in cities where most people live. Granted EV's produce some PM2.5 from tires and brakes. But that's a percentage of tail pipe emissions.
I am happy to be corrected, but I believe the only industrial scale production of hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons. Using electrolysis is hugely inefficient.
If this is true, a lot of talk of hydrogen is submarine marketing for the fossil fuel industry.
One thing you didn't mention is efficiency. Electrics are around 60% and gas around 20%. Once you have some power at the car, you make better much use of it.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buste...
That was my first thought as well. Gotta love rolling blackouts. But EV charging will likely take place at night when air conditioners are pulling less power so maybe it will smooth things out? They're still gonna have to support the peak load and do so more often.
Glad you asked.
The typical driver drives 12k to 15k miles per year. That's about 33 to 41 miles per day, or about the range of a 1st Gen Chevy Volt.
The thing is, you can recharge a Volt overnight from a normal household outlet (the kind you already have in your living room, kitchen, or garage). In other words, it uses only about as much power (~1.5 kW) as your toaster, coffee maker, hair dryer, or vacuum cleaner. It is dramatically less power than a central AC unit (around 4 to 6 kW).
So, no, this is not going to cause a massive problem for the grid.
> During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time.
This is more of a PG&E problem than a California problem. LA and Santa Clara both have municipally-owned electrical utilities (including generation and transmission) that don't have a problem keeping the lights on.
1. Zero-emissions - you are arguing semantics - if you are an EV and are sourcing your energy in CA your carbon emissions are very low. 2. CA is closing Nuclear plants and are doing alright. The loss in baseload power is getting replaced by inventive policies DR policies, energy storage, solar and some natural gas. No, the answer isn't just more Nuclear - can Nuclear be part of the solution? Maybe - Nuclear is really expensive and has some siting and health challenges. 3. The grid will tolerate a change in the overall load profile (i.e. more EVs) by dispatching new programs, new price signals and new assets that are variable. 4. California doesn't struggle to keep the lights on in the summer - it had rolling blackouts that have yet to be determined the first time in 19 years this year (19 years ago was due to illicit energy trading i.e. Enron trading). It does do rolling blackouts for risks to wild fires.
A nuclear plant is still a steam engine, so it would require significant amounts of water to cool, which aren't that easy to come by in a land where droughts happen so often.
Also there's so much sun there and solar panels are so cheap nowadays that waiting 7-odd years for a plant to start producing power doesn't look like a viable option.
China is leading the world in new nuclear power deployment, but still in terms of delivered GWh wind overtook nuclear there in 2012 and the gap is widening. Solar will cross that point in a few years.
If even a totalitarian state can't deploy nuclear at a pace competitive with alternatives, how is a place like California supposed to?
EDIT: That one is being decommissioned
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=1t0te1lvPsMd0...
Use this thing software and market. All of the cars can delay charge or buy when price is at particular point.
Weird tho Tesla avoids grid capability. CHAdeMO is in every EV in Japan (including fuel cell one). Can't find the stats how widely they are used tho.
If we witnessed a jump in battery technology, we may not even need to wait for 2035 for the market to do this for us. But in the meantime we're still seeing electric cars that cost at minimum 10K more than their gas counterparts (with the low cost of oil/gas right now only making that look worse).
I'd love to own a Tesla Model 3 for example, but realistically it is a $37K car that competes with $25K gas vehicles or $27K Hybrids. When is THAT going to change? When is electric going to be affordable for the average person?
The $7.5K federal tax incentives also disappeared (and we never had state incentives here).
The average price of a car bought in May of 2019 was $36,718. A Model 3 is $37,990. Given the offsets in maintenance and gas, I'd say the answer to that question is "now".
https://www.edmunds.com/industry/press/new-vehicle-prices-cl...
Gasoline cars can be filled by gas from any company, so there's actual competition. But an electric car mandate will expand PG&E's monopoly by billions of dollars per year. Imagine how poorly they will behave when they have a lock on both electricity and transportation.
I also think SUVs should possibly be banned fairly soon (Bad for cities, bad for roads, bad for parking, emissions etc.)
VW ID.3 €35,574 300km
Pegeuot e208 €29,682 340km
Hyundai Kona €33,971 305km
(Prices are for base models in Germany, including taxes, excluding incentives)
The Model 3 is around €50k here, so even with the discounted price it's still going to expensive compared to other cars. Now of course it has a greater range, but I am wondering if Tesla are going to bring out a more budget model for Europe to compete.
Also, you're putting the cart and horse in the wrong order, nobody felt entitled to anything, we were discussing EVs making sense without states needing to push/mandate them which means competitive pricing that's affordable relative to other offerings in the existing market.
Your whole argument feels like a way to shut down discussion.
If the technology was already there to replace cars with no price premium, we should be outlawing ICE cars today.
And remember folks, EVs aren't zero emissions, they're just remote emissions!
Maybe never... A lot of today's technology runs on fossil fuel. It may very well be the case that our standard of living will decrease as we won't find comparable source of energy.
One of the benefits of a carbon tax is that I could continue to drive cars with engines that go vroom as long as I want so long as I can afford to pay the tax. And there is a very realistic situation that all of my carbon can be offset for just a few hundred dollars a year, if we have the resources to invest in next gen offset technology.
But we are in a political situation where it is easier to outright ban this than simply ask people to pay for the cost.
It totally fucks anybody that can't charge at home. Do you know how many millions of people live in apartments? Do you think they're really going to shell out the cash to build EV chargers in all their parking spots?
The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger), while also having side effects of increasing the cost of all physical goods that need to be shipped. Semitrucks become more expensive to run, and while Tesla is working on a semi, it's only going to be useful for intra-city distribution, since semis used for inter-city travel are almost constantly on the road and will be driven by multiple drivers to keep moving, so they don't have time to charge.
People who are poor are already pay disproportionally by living in a culture that requires a car.
Having been poor most of my life, my problem has not been "I can't afford an EV". My problems have been "I can't afford to live somewhere with decent public transit options."
2) This is why I like the "carbon dividend" approach some have proposed. Tax people, but let some of the money flow back to the poorer members of society so that they can still live. I also think as a society we really need to question why we accept that there are just tons of poor people. Why not raise the floor a bit? Climate change (and pollution as well!) disproportionately affect the poor as well, so delaying action to fight it will hurt them in the long run.
But banning ICE cars is clearly even worse for those unable to afford an EV, right? Unless policy-makers think that precommitting to ban ICE cars by 2035 will lead to a sudden flurry of new EV development _that wouldn't have happened if they had just precommitted to adding large carbon taxes by 2035.
Just because we don't have the charging stations today doesn't mean we'll never have them.
The order seems vague enough that zero-emissions could possibly include net-zero emissions but I'm not sure we know all the details yet.
You can claim this is radical, but I suspect the auto manufacturers won't be building ICE cars by 2035 anyway.
EV cars are simply WAY cheaper to build than ICE cars. For example, GM quit manufacturing the Volt because the Bolt is stupidly cheaper to manufacture.
Given the current trends with people not buying cars anyway, this is effectively inevitable.
Use the right tool for the job. In this case, a free market solution (i.e. carbon tax) would drive carbon offset prices down, optimizing the solution without centralized control. What if moving fully to electric vehicles is only the 10th most cost-effective way of reversing climate change? With laws like this one, we're committing to a potentially sub-optimal solution, which means we have to find more dollars than we otherwise would need to solve the problem.
Note that the carbon tax (which I assume would include offsetting programs as the sources of carbon credits or the sink for tax dollars) does have some significant regulatory requirements and challenges; if you sell me an offset, how do I actually know that those 10 tons of CO2 were actually captured from the atmosphere? I think you'd need pretty strong regulation for there to be a workable international market in carbon tax credits, for example.
A carbon tax is only effective if everyone pays. Nevada doesn't care if California pays for carbon. However, if CA incentivizes electric vehicle production, multinational car companies can sell the same cars elsewhere.
https://twitter.com/benioff/status/558192472292360192?lang=e...
Granted this is a very bad experiment to run, and we should not do this, but it's not an existential crisis.
Study after study proves that people respond to price incentives. If you set a price for carbon (even less than the cost to sequester it from the atmosphere), people will reduce their output.
And there is a lot of low hanging fruit we could start with before we start ripping cars from people.
For context, EVs are a few percent of sales in California, and almost zero for trucks.
> Clean transport transition leader Norway hit a huge 70.2% plugin passenger vehicle market share in August, up from 49% a year ago. Pure battery electrics alone took 53% of the market.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/02/norway-in-august-over-7...
Coincidentally, the principal for Norway's huge sovereign wealth fund comes largely from oil extraction.
They are definitely not a good example of a free market choosing EVs because they are actually better.
We already went though something similar with catalytic converter requirements. Some people are going to drive 40+ year old cars, but they quickly become irrelevant.
Probably sooner. In 2034, a year before this takes place, gasoline car sales will probably be small to negligible. In 2045, it'll be a hassle to own a gasoline car when most of the gas stations are closed.
Could people start buying more Diesel cars, as well as trucks, because of this?
Gotta kick 'em when they're down. /s
On the flip side, it will be a great time to own a "buy here pay here" lot.
The board that regulates emissions in California is basically run by the executive, with legislative oversight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Air_Resources_Board
You need reliable 4x4 vehicles to access and work in the remote areas where many grapes are grown up here now.
The bigger issue is probably range, for users that need to work in truly remote areas. But big trucks can carry a lot of batteries, too. I think the number of operators that genuinely need more than ~500 miles or so of range is probably pretty low.
I can't recall a time that I've used a cordless drill and thought to myself, "man, this thing would be so much better if it were powered by a two-stroke motor".
This advantage is especially clear in the case of a 4x4: one need not include viscous couplings and fancy differentials.
Not true. You still have the suspention system which has a lot of moving parts. there are also the moving parts of the brakes. Then the steering system. In theory you don't need a transmission, but in practice you do.
There are a few less moving parts, but not substantially less. The moving parts you lose are mostly in a controlled environment with plenty of lubrication and no dirt (though there are other acid combustion byproducts).
> I can't recall a time that I've used a cordless drill and thought to myself, "man, this thing would be so much better if it were powered by a two-stroke motor".
I have a cordless chainsaw and weed whip. Both would be better with an IC engine. Batteries are much heavier than gas, and this is really noticeable when using them for a while. These are new Dewalt 60 volt systems, not some old technology. Of course there are advantages to battery - I won't got back to gas, like I would have 20 years ago when I first used a battery weed whip. I like the low noise and there is plenty of power. However the gas engine would be lighter.
I've also seen gas powered drills and I'm sure that the same applies, batteries are good, but the extra weight to get the same power is a factor. Most drills are used indoors of course so gas was never a real option and that is why battery drills become popular as soon as they worked at all.
I would love to have a diesel-powered 4x4 light pickup with a 5-speed.
I am sure there will, indeed, be special carve-outs and I am sure the auto manufacturers will find a way to exploit those carve-outs such that every dude in the state can continue to pretend they're a rancher (as they drive their quad cab 1.5ton to and from their apartment building every day).
Remember - you can never have too much truck.
California seems to have the curse of having enough going for it climate / business-wise that an incompetent and over-controlling government is tolerated by the population.
In the context of the issues facing people, climate regulations just aren't top of mind, excepting the tea party folks.
I fully support the governor in general, but this feels like a band-aid on poor fundamentals. In the case of housing, the state is incompetent and _under_ controlling. I also tend to think the state is _under_ controlling when it is hard to breathe because the air is dirty, something that's happened to me regularly since I've moved here.
[1] - https://www.theadvocates.org/2020/01/california-witnessed-a-...
[2] - https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm
[3] - https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/14/san-jose-unveils-new-...
[4] - https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-illegal-fireworks-comp...
[5] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/A-m...
[6] - https://www.actionnewsnow.com/content/news/Rolling-blackouts...
Text of order: https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/9.23.20-EO...
What if I need to drive somewhere in a hurry but my car isn't charged?
What if there's a power outage or I forget to plug in my car overnight?
I'm not saying these are blockers, but they're not convenient.
In Tesla's new announcement the other day one of the other things they mentioned is like a 10x increase in battery charge times with the new cell design which will be ready in 3 years or so. So give it time.
Is making a trip to a gas station just to fill your car up a good use of time? Or is it better to accept responsibility and make sure you've plugged it in at home? Have you ever forgotten to fill up your gas tank and been stuck on the road? C'mon.
Very nearly, yes. I imagine this hits home for folks with ADHD.
There will always be a need for some people to have personal cars. There's no silver bullet to climate change, and moving to electric is a good thing. However, we realistically need to reduce total consumption (in terms of environmental resource input) massively. Making it easier for people to live without cars is relatively low-hanging fruit, and increases quality of life, to boot.
You can buy a rust-free used V8 SUV for like 2-3k in CA, and it'll be on the road for another decade if maintained.
If the electric car market is mature enough by 2035 for this to not cause major economic issues for car dealers and others throughout the state, then it will stand. But if that's the case, the majority of car sales will be electric with or without this order. If that's not the case, it will be quietly rescinded or modified by the then-governor. So this order, effectively, is just political posturing and changes nothing that won't naturally happen (or not happen) anyway.
The Python library which does the calculations is here:
https://pypi.org/project/carculator/
One nice thing about our tool is that it calculates life cycle emissions including projected changes in the electricity grid of the region you live in. Of course, these are uncertain, but most other academic analysis just use the current grid mix.
It's important to realize that, even with the advances in electric vehicles, while they are better than combustion cars, they are far from zero-emission. Lifetime emissions for an electric car could still be 200 g CO2/km, split almost evenly between the electricity supply and everything else. Depending on usage, which of course has wide spatial variation, just road construction and maintenance itself could be 20 g CO2/km (this number is valid for Switzerland, which has very high utilization rates).
I think most people who are have seriously investigated the current system and possible future developments in the next 10 to 20 years have come to the conclusion that a lot of the change has to be in consumer behaviour - clean tech is not clean enough, or can't be scaled up enough in the current economic and political climate, to reach any reasonable climate goal.
"Intermediate" doesn't work and directs me to http://carculator.psi.ch/tool/ which gives a 404
Just thought you might want to know
So unless I am missing something, unlike most executive orders, this order is merely symbolic and does not commit the government or anyone else to anything.
Am I missing something?
"California accounts for half the US EV market" is quite striking.
What are the 34 companies? Is this counting non-vehicle companies like ChargePoint, tiny startups, existing automakers with EV offerings?
It's striking how many more EV options are available in Europe. Here in CA, we mainly get electric SUVs. I hope this announcement expands the market.
Li-Cycle, a Canadian battery recycling firm has chosen the location for its first commercial lithium-ion battery recycling Hub: Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York.
Construction of the $175 million Hub facility is set to begin in 2021 and the facility is planned to be fully operational in 2022.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/21/north-americas-first-...
Short answer: Tesla 100% recycles their batteries and will be able to 100% recycle them indefinitely.
Using California's Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventory Query Tool [3], I searched for transportation, on road, light duty vehicles only, CO2 only.
For 2017, the emissions were 58 million tons from light duty trucks and SUVs plus 58.4 million tons from passenger cars.
The total of 116.4 million tons is about 27.5% of all California emissions. Since according to [1] the transportation sector accounts for 41% of all CA emissions, light duty road vehicles account for about 67% of California's transportation emissions.
Heavy duty trucks account for another 32.3 million tons of CO2 emissions.
[1] https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/g...
What about the ships that burn the dirtiest fuel imaginable right up until they near California ports? Are they still going to be greeted with open arms?
What about all of the methane leaks from natural gas operations in the state? Will those actors face consequences?
What about the oil drilling that happens all along California's coast? Will they still be able to extract fossil fuels without paying royalties to the state?
Passenger vehicles are such a small portion of CO2 emissions, and implementing these restrictions pisses off a lot of people who do not want to change. High hanging fruit that is barely ripe.
Saying there's lots of other work to do is not a good rationale for not doing this.
Surely you could require new vehicles to be zero-emission sooner than that?
I recently started https://tryelectricnow.com to connect EV owners with car buyers to try to have a larger, distributed impact. One ride will 'click' for most people, and they won't go back.
https://www.politifact.com/california/promises/newsom-meter/
California is on fire, seems only reasonable to react to that as Governor.
I say this is a EV, plugin hybrid, gas, and diesel owner. The EV/PHEV were 100% purchased because of commute/climate reasons... but you can pull my diesel truck from my cold dead hands.
Because PG&E is such an aging, unreliable electricity network I seriously worry about what this will mean for how people expect to reliably charge those cars in northern CA during the summers of rolling blackouts etc without huge amounts of infrastructure rebuild.
What about motorcycles and trains? Is this just cars?
My motorcycle already gets like 80mpg.
Motorcycles also pollutes more per mile than a light truck. They generate less carbon dioxide but produces four times more hydrocarbons, thirty times more nitrogen oxides, and eighty times more carbon monoxide.
There are small EVs like the Mini Cooper or the Fiat 500. It's true the Mini Electric is heavier than the non-electric version, but only ~15%, and it actually improves handling.
I think the tech is more than there.
Additional strain on the electrical grid could do so (else more rolling blackouts)
>The Governor invested in forest health and fuel reduction
Missing text "Your money"
The Governor invested YOUR MONEY in forest health and fuel reduction
Ok, so a dealership can still bring cars in from AZ, OR, NV etc?
We need to move faster :)
Anyone else sick of seeing careless Tesla drivers swerving around on autopilot?
What a joke. Politicians are useless.
By 2035 I don't think people will be living in California.
My bad joke for the day. I'll see myself out.
Ironically free market advocates often are against pricing in externalities through things like a carbon tax. If we priced carbon appropriately decades ago then the market would look drastically different today and this new zero-emissions requirement wouldn't be needed.
If the government didn’t involve itself in any green energy, Tesla would not be profitable.[1]
[1] https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-s-mai...
Right... Unless you have something like an aggressive carbon tax (at the consumer level), why would the free market work? Climate Change is clearly a tragedy of the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
The technology is clearly possible, but getting past a local equilibrium requires some energy.
Yawn
If the value in adopting electric vehicles is there, let people recognize that value on their own and decide on their own to adopt it. Alter incentive structures in minor ways but don't override an open-ended libertarian choice architecture with top-down authoritarian decision-making. More about this in a book called Nudge, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_%28book%29
This lead to the phasing out of domestic coal in cities, regulation on power plant flue gas, and so forth, over the following decade. People, and the energy industry, kicked and screamed, but the government (at the time controlled by noted lefties the Conservative party) did it anyway. There were two more incidents in 1957 and 1962 killing 750-1000 people each, but that was about the end of it.
Maybe in a parallel universe the libertarian government of the UK did nothing, and people reduced their emissions on the same timeline anyway. But I think it's somewhat more likely that in that parallel universe people are still dying horribly in their thousands every time the dangerous weather conditions (cold, no wind) repeat. People are notoriously bad at externalities.
Yeah, its almost like this is one step in a long, complicated process of getting the world off of fossil fuels, or something?
Anyway, an electric car can run off of pretty much any energy source. It's much more expensive to make gasoline from sunlight or nuclear power than charging a battery.
(And, if you're wondering, yes, making gasoline from sunlight (biofuels) is a thing, and no, it isn't practical, and yes, people DO try.)
This is going to be terrible for everyone who doesn't drive new cars because you can bet your ass that if they actually hit their goal and no new fossil fuel cars are sold in 2035 by 2040 they'll have massive "polluter" (or whatever they want to call it) surcharges (aka taxes in disguise) on what's already the highest registration prices in the nation.
So the people who are driving a 2020 Camry in 2040 are gonna get screwed hard.
If they truly believe electric will soon be economically viable without government subsidy (as all the headlines proclaim) then what's the point of the law?
Same goes for most SUVs versus Model Y. Many gas cars at this point are already a very bad economic decision especially when you consider tanking resale value. In a few years it will be the same for trucks versus electric trucks which will have up to 600 miles range.
Legislation though... that is a longer topic. Basically the gas car companies have a lot of reasons to resist and come up with seeming deals so without a law they will perpetuate gas for much longer.
People are still making enormously bad environmental decisions all based on the 1-4 road trips they’ll do per year.
Ostensibly, to reduce CO2 emissions.
> This is going to be terrible for everyone who doesn't drive new cars
Unfortunately, cars have been pumping out negative externalities for more than a century. You can't avoid these negative externalities forever.
You comment indicate why it discourages people buying non electric cars even now.
So it's a good win for Earth?
Newsom is the governor of a state that lauds itself as being the most insightful and aware of Climate Change -- yet for all these years the wise leaders have been doing nothing to prepare. We've been in drought and fire mode for about a decade now. How many new reservoirs have been proposed and built? What forestry practices have changed? Basically, none.
His state is on fire, and he cannot keep the power on at peak times. This grand move is an attempt at deflection and distraction from his (and his predecessors') lack of true leadership.
Er, no. It is inevitable, but the degree of change absolutely continues to matter.
> US government does not even believe that any such thing is happening and has relaxed EPA regulations on polluters and such, so is CA restricting sale of fossil fuel vehicles going to matter in the long run?
Here's the context you might be missing: CA is a huge automobile market, and has historically set a number of requirements that automakers eventually incorporate into all cars sold into the US market. It's cheaper to build one SKU than two, as long as the CA SKU is only mildly more expensive than the non-CA would be.
Additionally, auto manufacturers will have similar requirements for the EU market on a similar timeline.
Operative word being 'the long run'. The current US government may be replaced within the next few months with one that might be expected to take a more normal view on the problem, so what it's doing now is arguably fairly irrelevant, when you're talking about 2035.
Many European countries have recently made similar moves, with the EU as a whole and China making noises about something similar (though probably on a longer timescale; 2040 or later). So this isn't just a weird California thing.
Just because the USA has federal administration that doesn't want to act on climate change right now doesn't mean that it won't get a greener administration in the future.
As for being a lost cause, isn't it preferable to minimize the effect, at least? would you rather the sea levels go up by 2.0 meters or 1.5 meters?
The extraction of Rare Earth ,and Electricity coming mostly from Coal in US don’t make them any cleaner than Gas Vehicle.
Hence you can buy your non-ev outside of California and come back with it few minutes later ...
This is pure communication , there is no real intention to actually address climate change.
Hence , we are doing far worse than every GIEC model and most countries do not respect COP21 agreement....
Not true:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...
Another drastic measure would be to ban citizen ownership of cars. Local, regional, and national transportation services could fill in the gaps. When I was in Brazil, you could pay 2 Reals($) to hop in a van that ran on a circuit like a bus, but cheaper. People will fill the gaps if there's money in it for them.
Another drastic measure would be to move all the money being dumped into self driving cars and electric cars to public transportation infrastructure/services.
Another drastic measure would be to heavily tax processed food, so less energy is consumed to feed us. (And it will make people healthier, which will save a lot of energy in health care.).
Another drastic measure would be to ban imports on most goods and force them to be produced locally. Now that we're forced to piss in our own pool, that will really motivate clean manufacturing. And we'll spend less energy getting the goods to the consumers.
But no, the American way of solving problems involves adding more to the equation, not taking away.
This is partly satire, maybe 30% serious.
In any event, California also already cannot keep up with its electricity demands. Onboarding more renewables with batteries is not the solution, especially as California's car market will drastically increase demand for battery production.
There are so many layers to why this is stupid.
- Battery production is already a highly polluting operation. The mining needed to put the batteries together is not going to get easier or cleaner as the demand for batteries is artificially exponentially increased via California mandate.
- How are you going to produce enough power for all these electric cars? Solar and wind aren't going to cut it, and they need to be supported by large battery or backup generation infrastructure. The batteries won't be available in large enough capacity. The backup generation is - wait for it - powered by gas, and less efficient for transportation than directly burning gas in the car's engine.
- I'm predicting many individuals purchase gas generators as backups for their home, given how inconsistent power availability will be in California.
- All these inconveniences will be absorbed by wealthy folks, like many of the commenters here, who pat themselves on the back for their virtuous actions. All the while callously creating ever greater burdens on the lower and middle class.
Poor people aren't buying new cars. They're buying 10 year old cars that can still run on gas, be hybrids, or be electric. The same situation as now.
> - Battery production is already a highly polluting operation.
So is gas, "both ways". EG: exploration, drilling, refining, shipment, and actually burning it. Not to mention spills. This is a straw man.
> - I'm predicting many individuals buy gas generators as backups for their home, given how inconsistent power availability will be in California.
This is a PG&E problem.
Don't hate progress, dude. New cars must not pollute in 15 years time. You could raise a kid to have a better understanding of the environment than a lot of people in that same time. This is a long time.