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Trump Administration Plans To Freeze Obama-Era Fuel Standards (theverge.com)
The Trump administration plans to freeze Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards starting in 2021, according to a report from The Washington Post. The report says the Trump administration "would go even further by restricting a state's ability to set its own fuel standards, which would be a strike against California and its strict state-specific emissions rules," reports The Verge. From the report: The proposal has been reportedly drafted by the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, and the plan right now is to freeze standards for cars and light trucks at levels set for the year 2021 and keep them their for five years. The Obama administration's rules, which involved a partnership with California and car makers, set standards at 50 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. Obama also, through the Clean Air Act, granted California a waiver to set its own, higher standards. That way, if automobile manufacturers wanted to maintain a presence in the lucrative California market, they'd have to abide by the new rules. The Trump administration now says a separate law overrules that arrangement, The Washington Post reports.
Ford just mostly pulled out of the North American car market, leaving the US/Canada with a bunch of tippy little trucklets and bigger trucks. I hope gas does a 2008 and shoots up to $5/gal soon -- if it won't push people to buy more reasonable cars, maybe it will at least help sales of electric cars out of their current niche.
Also, thank God for the Japanese makers who still sell reasonably-sized, nice-to-drive actual cars in the US market.
When you govern by issuing waivers to the law instead of actually using compromise and diplomacy to pass laws, then at some point you have to expect a new Presidential Administration might be elected and revoke those waivers and reverse previous executive actions.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
And there I was thinking that the Republican party were all about giving states more freedom and independence.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
I always learned that states rights was an outdated racist concept that we killed off in the Civil War. Having 50 standards was wrong when having one standard made much more sense. The state level bureaucrats got substandard educations from State U instead of the elite Ivy League and as such were unqualified to govern effectively. Now suddenly states rights is progressive and having 50 different standards designed by morons is a good thing? Am I the only one experiencing cognitive dissonance here?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Only where such freedom and rights benefit DOW 30 corporations or certain churches where the lunatics run the asylum.
That's what the major car companies kept trying to shovel down consumers' throats, and nobody bought them. It has nothing to do with charging station availability. With such a short range, you don't really have much choice but to charge your car every night when you get home, because nobody wants to spend 30+ minutes every day charging. (Remember, you won't be able to charge as fast if you're filling the battery all the way to the top, and the shorter the total range, the more likely you'll be to have to fully fill the battery every day, so AFAIK, charging should take disproportionately longer per mile than with longer-range cars, assuming all else is equal.)
The thing is, Tesla's charge times (except when the supercharger is full and you have to wait behind four or five cars just to start charging, like you do in most of the Bay Area) are actually pretty much in the sweet spot, at 50-70 minutes. That's long enough to get out of the car, walk to a restaurant, eat, and come back. At 30 minutes, that isn't possible unless the charger is literally in the parking lot of the restaurant. It's too long to treat as just another minor part of your commute like a gas station fill-up would be, but it isn't long enough to comfortably get food while you wait. So IMO, no matter how ubiquitous charging stations become, unless charge times drop to almost nothing, there will never be a serious market for cars with only a 100-mile range except perhaps in California (and even then, only for the carpool lane stickers).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Because we can't have a smaller government if it's the wrong small government.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Cyanide and carbon monoxide are also made of carbon. Try sniffing some and telling me it's not a pollutant ... oh wait.
The majority of Americans don't live in the rural US. Infernal combustion cars aren't going anywhere for the 10% of truly rural population.
Have you ever stopped to think about the *quality* of the jobs he pledged to "bring back"? If any jobs are "brought back", it'll be bottom-of-the-barrel, meaningless, back-breaking work that won't serve America's long-term future or viability at all.
Let me know when his Congress can pass a balancing or surplus budget and minimum wage is livable again. You guys like the 1950s, right? You could buy a home, have children, and own a home on minimum wage in the '50s through till the 80s, when double-income became a thing and everyone's prices rose to match it. Ever since then, the poor have paid for the affluence of the middle- and upper- class.
Funny, that era was the time that the baby boomers enjoyed the most of their fortune, only to do everything they can to keep all future generations from enjoying the same fortune that the "greatest generation" from the 1910s made possible through their sacrifice and tireless work.
"Common sense" dictates that if you put a bunch of toxic gas into the atmosphere, nature will pay for it somewhere. Unless you know of some magical anti-pollution machine high up in the sky that filters all this shit and puts it somewhere... your pretty little truck contributes to the problem; being an obnoxious twat and "rolling coal" only harms humanity's future. Do you want your great-great- grandkids to be cleaning up the mess your generation created? Gen X and millennials are already paying for your generation's economic and political fuck-ups, with the next generation likely to be caught in it, too. Why add to the mess?
Blind selfishness will be the end of us.
when Clinton (Bill) shifted the Democratic party right to win the presidency. The Republicans then moved right to protect their own identity (after all, why vote Republican when the Dems are damn near the same) and then the Dems decided to move to the new "center" and here we are with both parties far, far to the right of Eisenhower. Bernie's trying to get things moving back in the direction of FDR and the like.
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How about the reason that many of their customers want to buy something besides a volt or a prius style vehicle?
But sure, let's force all restaurants to close and all grocery stores to only sell vegetables and low-fat meats because the feds have decided that's what's best for people to eat and who cares about what people's own preferences are!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.