Cali Bureaucrats Bans Sale of Diesel Trucks After 2036

P. Gardner Goldsmith | April 30, 2023
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In a move that could have ripple effects across the country, the Delphic bureaucracy called the California Air Resources Board (CARB – how quaint) announced Friday that it will impose a ban on the sale of diesel-powered trucks after 2036 and impose a “zero emissions” mandate on all trucks starting in 2042.

One wonders if the state government will have chased away the entire population by that time...

John Hugh Demastri reports for the Daily Caller:

“The California Air Resources Board (CARB) finalized the Advanced Clean Fleet rule, which would mandate that 50% of all state and local government vehicle fleet purchases be 50% zero-emissions by 2024, and 100% by 2027, and create a registry for drayage trucks. The rule — which comes one day after the board voted to implement the state’s first-ever rules to limit train emissions — would go even further than recent California rules approved by President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, which would cut diesel truck sales in half by 2035.”

It’s important to remember a few key facts when seeing their “plans.”

First, the term “zero emissions” is a fake-out, a decoy, or, to put it bluntly, a lie. The electric vehicles (EVs) that the CARB-o-nauts in California insinuate will replace all these targeted internal-combustion-based vehicles will have to get and hold energy somehow. That energy will likely will be ion-spinning electricity that flows from…electric plants. Those plants might be nuclear – a small likelihood – that derive their power from burning natural gas, or they might be coal. Or they might generate electricity from highly expensive, highly inefficient, and highly unreliable solar or wind sources. Or that power might even come from hydro-electric plants, which have their own environmental issues with which people must contend. In turn, all those “sources” require heavy investments of natural resources and energy just to build the facilities, let alone to maintain them.

Then there are the transport costs and diminishing returns of medium impedance. Electricity can’t be easily stored. It’s “transmitted."

As I have reported for MRCTV, California already has seen its Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) electric near-monopoly change its electricity supply patterns because its centrally important lines mostly run over poorly managed government-run lands. Sparks from the lines shed and are a terrible fire risk.

Adds the Daily Caller’s Demastri:

“’The amount of chaos and dysfunction that is going to be created by this rule will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before,’ Chris Shimoda, senior vice president of the California Trucking Association, told San Francisco news outlet KRON4. ‘The likelihood that it is going to fail pretty spectacularly is very high. It’s very unfortunate’”

That’s an understatement.

The state has no place telling truck manufacturers what they can offer to potential buyers or telling potential buyers what they can buy. Engaging in a peaceful trade does not harm another person. And the idea that use of Diesel or any other kind of internal combustion engine is causing a catastrophic warming of the planet not only has not been born out by facts, even if it were causing damage to other people such that it could be properly measured and people could prove damage in a court, the so-called “answer” of “green” energy is not a panacea. It carries heavy environmental costs and imposes terrible economic costs and inefficiencies.

Related: More Climate Cult Craziness: CA Bans 76K Trucks Made Pre-2010

These all are factors that should not be dictated by government, and to do so is immoral. And to engage in that kind of activity is merely to act like a mafioso under a graceful title of “commissioner” or “Assembly Member” or “Governor."

Thankfully, some politicians from California aren’t on this “green train” to oblivion. On April 27, Congresswoman Michelle Steel (R) tweeted:

“After crippling our supply chains with the disastrous #AB5, Sacramento wants to go even further, completely banning diesel trucks. This backwards attack on truckers will only serve to further harm our economy.”

And, by AB5, Steel refers to the unctuous, freedom-crushing 2019 California statute that forces employers who pay outside workers per-piece to categorize them as “full-time” if they hire those freelancers or “gig workers” more than a certain number of times per year. It was a way to strong-arm business owners to give freelancers health insurance.

What a surprise. Rather than doing the peaceful thing and entering the market to offer their own plans and jobs to potential gig workers, the politicians commanded others to do as they desired.

And so it is with the CARB bureau. Do any of these people care that their diktats will further disrupt peaceful people trying to haul needed items to willing buyers? Do they care about the costs they are imposing? Do they want to enter the market and run their own fleet of electric trucks to see if that attracts investors and clients?

Of course not. But their mandates will bring about all those problems and many more. Since the California vehicle market is so vast, state mandates see national manufacturers change their lines of new releases in order to conform to those mandates.

As Statista reported in 2020, California is home to so many auto-buyers, it ranked at the tenth-largest market in the world – that’s among NATIONS, and auto-makers tend to work California edicts into their overall U.S. fleets, rather than go to the expense of changing their plant arrangements and splitting off output for “California only.”

So, even if we don’t live in the Golden State, we likely will feel the negative consequences of this new collectivist set of commands. Not only is it going to mess-up the auto sales market, making it harder to get internal combustion-based trucks, it’s going to increase costs for the supply chain.

The imposition is dangerous and driven by an absolute disregard for property rights and peace.

People are fleeing California in droves. But, sadly, the leftist Climate Cult impositions on the poor folks still trying to work there keep multiplying, and will hit all of us in the end.

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