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White House Proposal Rolls Back Fuel Economy Standards, No Exception For California (npr.org)
The Trump administration has proposed a rollback of Obama-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards, while simultaneously taking aim at California's unique ability to set more stringent rules. From a report: Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency called for the fuel economy standards for new vehicles to ratchet up over time. The increasingly strict standards were designed to combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a new proposed rule that would instead freeze the standards at their 2020 levels for six years. "Cars and trucks are just part of the basic fiber of the American economy and the American experience, so we take what we're doing very, very seriously," Bill Wehrum, EPA assistant administrator, told reporters on Thursday. The agencies say that increasing fuel efficiency requirements contributes to an increase in the cost of new cars and trucks, which may discourage consumers from buying new vehicles. Because newer vehicles have advanced safety features, the administration argues, increasing fuel economy requirements therefore harms highway safety, as well as having economic effects.
Tax the top income bracket an extra 0.001% and use that to fund tax discount vouchers for all new cars with better fuel efficiency. Pocket the savings from population health improvement - not spending billions on fifth and sixth yachts but instead letting millions buy new cars that will give them and their families and their communities healthier environments to live in, and increase economic productivity by living longer. That is, unless this is all deception to further whatever short term goals Trump and the US leadership have been paid/bribed to represent instead of their constituents. That misrepresentation is failure to do their actual jobs, and they all need to be fired then.
So that the main champions of thwarting and reversing attempts to combat greenhouse gas based global warming can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court in the future?
Many legal tests are based on "what a reasonable person should have known" and "what action a reasonable person would take, given this knowledge."
Criminal negligence, fraud (in communication about the issue), criminal conspiricy (between fossil fuel industry and corrupt politicians acting on their behalf). etc. etc.
Let's start this effort, please. The current policy insanity cannot continue.
There is no excuse of ignorance at this late date.
Read https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
for a good history of "when we knew".
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
States rights are a dog whistle, it has nothing to do with the actual rights of the states.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You seem to think that passing a law is going to do something great for the planet. It won't. There is absolutely no affordable alternative to burning fossil fuels right now, and for the foreseeable future. We don't need to "reduce" fossil fuel use, we need to stop, and leave them in the ground. No law is going to achieve that. Only determined men and women in white coats living in laboratories have a chance to do that. We don't know how to store electricity sufficiently to use in in automotive _or_ grid electrical usages. We just don't. When someone figures that out, then they have to figure out how to generate it without generating CO2. People keep hollering that nukes generate way too much CO2 by the concrete that is used for their construction - approx 400,000 cubic feet, but you know what? Those wind machines have a minimum of 250 cubic yards of concrete in each of their foundations, and so far there are 52,000 of them that equal about the same output, 8 gigawatts, as the largest nuke complex which is somewhere in Japan. There's supposedly 7 reactors in that one, so figure 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete, but the 52,000 wind machines already have 13 million cubic feet of concrete. The CO2 is released when concrete is manufactured and calcium carbonate, CaCO3 is reduced to lime and CO2, which gets vented. Maybe it could be sequestered, but that would likely dramatically raise the cost. But anyway, 8 Gigwatts isn't anywhere close to our grid usage right now, and if we add all our cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, railroad locomotives, and so forth, there would be a wind generator in every outdoor photograph taken in the borders of the USA including the National Parks.
So, how to generate clean energy? We can't. Yet. Clean energy looks a lot like geothermal, but we'd have to be able to drill a hole deep enough pretty much everywhere, and we don't know how to drill that deeply yet.
Meanwhile, this damned CAFE gov't meddling in the marketplace will have the usual results of making things more expensive. Making things more expensive creates poor people, costs the gov't in welfare payments, increases Federal gov't borrowing, and prevents those not in poverty from nevertheless buying new cars because they're too expensive. They keep the old ones that pollute more, get less gas mileage, and defeat the main objectives of cleaner and more efficient. Unintended consequences.
The best thing to do is wait. There is absolutely huge incentive already to make electric cars work, as well as electric everything-else. Why? Becuase electricity is cheap compared to fossil fuels. If you could get a fully functional electric car, it would have a fuel cost equivalent of around low 1-dollar-a-gallon range. Maybe $1.12 / gallon equivalent for an electric. It would also have insane torque making it a virutal race car, and people would LOVE their electric cars, as long as they could do my 1st day of vacation this year, which was an 800 mile drive. Left Virginia, I think it was Arkansas where I first stopped, just short of Texas. Make electric cars that can do that, they'll sell like hotcakes and you won't need the gov't telling anyone what to do. The market will force it. And trying to tell people what to do before the science is ready to support it will just cause misery and probably make the air dirtier and burn more fossil fuels instead of less because of the old cars still on the road that wouldn't be if new ones weren't insanely expensive because they're electric before electric is ready.