The Climate Change Craziness is getting worse.
Following on the heels of Californian politicians requiring solar panels on new homes (because nothing says “freedom” like telling people what they MUST include in their own living spaces), and mimicking planned prohibitions of gas-powered car sales in CA and NJ by 2035, Charlie Baker, the pseudo-Republican governor of Massachusetts, just announced his own vaunted “plan” to prohibit the sale of cars that use the internal combustion engine – to be banned by 2035.
Roberto Baldwin reports for Car and Driver:
Massachusetts is joining California with a plan to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Governor Charlie Baker released a 2050 decarbonization road map that includes the reduction of emissions from passenger cars. Massachusetts states that 27 percent of statewide emissions come from light-duty vehicles (passenger vehicles). The goal is for the state to reach net-zero fossil-fuel emissions by 2050.
Which is all a smoke-and-mirrors show, and will have disastrous consequences.
First, who is Charlie Baker – or anyone with a similar political mandate plan – to tell others what they can and cannot peacefully buy or sell? Will he mandate the elimination of fireplaces, based on his Chicken Little phobia of carbon emissions? How about the size of rooms? They require heat, after all, and room size has an effect on the temp of a room, which, in turn, has an effect on energy usage, which, in turn, has an effect on DREADED CARBON EMISSIONS, so unless he mandates how houses are built, WE’RE ALL GONNA BURN.
Of course, for Charlie and the rest of the hand-wringing-yet-cudgel-wielding political class, and for their questionable “professoriate” friends whose jaws seem inseparable from the government-funding baby-bottle, the glorious future lies in mandating that people use their magic “electric vehicles” or “EVs”. And, like most folks who’ve been pushing electric cars, they forget that the power for those has to come from some source.
Sure, it’s possible that some of the politicians are wily enough to know that the source typically will be politically connected power monopolies that have held their positions in most states precisely because of political bans on competition, but many don’t’ even think about the source of the battery power.
Right now, and for decades to come, that power has to come from either the burning of coal or natural gas – both of which emit the dreaded “carbon”, in the forms of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
Or, as reasonable critics of electric-power pushers often say, “So, you drive a coal-powered car. That’s quaint.”
The politically-created EV push also neglects to deal with the “battery problem”, which comes in two forms. First, the batteries require a lot of energy to create – from the need for expensive and rare minerals, to the manufacturing process, to delivery. And the spent batteries contain dangerous chemicals that cannot be easily released into the wild, i.e. buried in a typical landfill. The contents of those batteries are almost as dangerous as the contents of most politicians’ minds, so, yeah, that’s a troubling conundrum.
Then there’s the battery POWER problem, which, as Eric Peters of EPAutos.com has frequently covered, is endemic to the industry of EVs and will not be surmounted for many, many decades.
Simply put, EV batteries require frequent charging, and that’s not a feasible option for people who live far from their work destinations. As Eric Peters notes:
While lots of people live in cities, most of them can live without cars and already do. It is the people in the suburbs who most need and depend on cars – and for them, electric cars will be a problem, for the same reason they are a problem for me.
And this is why many politicians have been pushing for tax-subsidized “charging stations”, where, thanks to government picking the pockets of people who don’t own electric cars, EV owners can sit, plug-in their short-distance albatrosses… and wait…
Hence, we see financially-in-the-red California announcing its plan to spend $384 million over the next few years to build new charging stations and other EV infrastructure.Because, ya know, if an idea is economically viable, it requires government stealing from people to subsidize it.
Makes perfect sense. Just like the mindless devotion people have to the unsupportable idea that mankind is causing catastrophic “climate change”.
Curiously, this move by MA Gov Baker comes just weeks after the December anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, which was a violent attack by the “wicked” awesome Sons of Liberty on British East India Tea Corporation ships docked in Boston Harbor. They did so because of the Tea Act, a statute passed in Britain that forbade colonials from buying anything other than tea supplied by said corporation.
Yet, today, in that same city, a few hundred yards from where those courageous rebels protested against the favoritism and corruption showering government manna on that tea corporation, Charlie Baker wants to surpass the Brits by multitudes of despotism, literally making it illegal to buy or sell new gas-powered cars – cars that offer the best bang for the energy-buck-input.
Will Boston Harbor have room for a lot of dumped electric cars, come 2035?