It’s been a while in coming, but California will officially mandate electric cars no later than 2035.
No new gas or diesel-powered vehicles will be sold or licensed there barely more than 12 years from now. Last year, electric vehicle sales represented less than 10% of the approximately 1.8 million new cars sold in the Brownout State.
Only 607,600 electric vehicles were produced in the U.S. last year. Assuming nothing radical changes, between now and 2035, California buyers alone will require three times as many EVs as were produced in 2021.
Or people will hang on to their gas-powered cars much longer, defeating the purpose of the mandate. I know I would.
The CEOs of Tesla and Toyota — Elon Musk and Akio Toyoda — agreed in 2020 that full electrification won’t work. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets,” Toyoda warned. “When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?”
Sure, they just don’t care.
Toyoda’s comments followed Musk’s math that electricity production would have to “double” to eliminate gas and Diesel engines — and that would be on top of electricity demand that’s already accelerating:
In an interview with Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer, hosted by Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, Musk said sourcing the energy necessary to power EVs would become the biggest obstacle over the next two decades. It’s actually something experts have been considering for a while and Germany, in particular, has had to confront as its own massive push toward sustainable energy turned out to be, well, largely unsustainable.
Energy prices in Europe today are at record highs.
Curiously, California made no announcements today regarding increased electricity production.
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From there, things get worse.
Here’s a vital tidbit from the New York Times writeup:
“This is huge,” said Margo Oge, an electric vehicles expert who headed the Environmental Protection Agency’s transportation emissions program under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “California will now be the only government in the world that mandates zero-emission vehicles. It is unique.”
But is it really unique?
Not for long:
The restrictions are important because not only is California the largest auto market in the United States, but more than a dozen other states typically follow California’s lead when setting their own auto emissions standards.
My home state of Colorado is one of them. This item is from 2018:
Last week, Colorado became the 13th state to adopt California’s stringent vehicle emissions standards, which may make the Centennial State ready for a showdown with the Trump administration.
The state’s Air Quality Control Commission approved the California standard to begin for the 2022 model year. The commission claimed that the new regulations will reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the state by 2 million tons per year by 2030.
The adoption comes after Governor John Hickenlooper signed an executive order over the summer to embrace the California emissions regulations.
Did you get that? Unelected regulators in my state imposed new restrictions formulated by unelected regulators in another state. Where’s that “republican form of government” the Constitution guarantees the people of each state?
Except that this is real, not a joke. California can’t keep the lights on and the A/C running at the same time as things are now. They’ve just mandated themselves into plugging in cars where there’s no juice.
And California’s self-destructive standards will spread like cancer from one set of regulators to another.
Decades ago when the Justice Department ordered the breakup of AT&T, my dad quipped, “I hope whenever anybody at DOJ needs to make a call there’s nobody there.”
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