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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

I say this as an EV fanatic and Tesla owner, but I'm with you that outright banning ICE cars is the wrong solution.

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.

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> increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor

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."

1) Regard apartments, the government should make funds available to add charging to existing apartment buildings. It could also do stuff like add chargers to light posts, as I believe some European countries do. Also, we can normalize running extension cords out to your car as a temporary measure :). People do this with their $100k PIH Volvos in my neighborhood.

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.

> the government should make funds available

The government subsidizing this wouldn't change the fact that it doesn't make economic sense.

> This is why I like the "carbon dividend" approach some have proposed.

Using carbon taxes to fund welfare doesn't actually offset the negative externalities of carbon, so you haven't fixed anything.

> 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)

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.

This only bans the sale of new ICE vehicles. Presumably, lower income households will continue to drive their ICE cars after this ban, and then move into an EV sometime down the road once the post-2035 used car market has enough EVs at the right price.

I genuinely wonder if the prices of used EVs with decent range (say a long range model 3 available now) will reach the same price as an older Honda Civic. I figure the batteries will be worth quite a bit still in the car. Essentially making the possibility of buying a used $2000 electric car impossible.

In some ways it’s worse. Even if all major car manufacturers offer EVs by 2035, how many used $2000 EV Civics will be on the market by then? I am all for going all in on EV but let’s not pretend like it’s a simple matter of pressing your thumb on the neck of the manufacturers to suddenly fix the problem. How many places in the US are specifically built to be human sized and not car sized? NYC? Maybe a few other very specific larger cities? So if you don’t want the CA economy to tank overnight in 2035 (who is going to show up to work if they can’t drive their cars?), you will need to also subsidize car prices because even ICE based vehicles are increasing in price way faster than inflation while wages are stagnant.

> So if you don’t want the CA economy to tank overnight in 2035 (who is going to show up to work if they can’t drive their cars?)

Why would it tank overnight?

Did you misinterpret the requirement? It's not a banning on owning ICE, it's a ban on selling new ICE cars. You would still be able to buy, own, and drive a used ICE.

That’s fair. The above comments were alluding to theoretically banning all ICE cars so I was I guess thinking of that when I wrote my comment.

Yes if it’s just on the sale if new vehicles that could potentially work though I still worry that the manufacturers will normalize $40k cars and use this as an excuse.

We built the infrastructure to pump stale dinosaur juice out of the ground in Saudi-Arabia, refine it, and deliver it to your gas tank. We built the infrastructure to bring potable water to every home.

Just because we don't have the charging stations today doesn't mean we'll never have them.

pretty sure that by 2035 we'll have more widespread charging, especially if this law is still on the books and soon coming into effect

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