Cosmic Charlie

Biden's Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg believes Americans suffering at the gas pumps is actually a very good thing because it will force them to purchase electric vehicles.

blakes7

Does anyone resent being forced by government into buying far more expensive, less convenient cars in the name of improving the climate, when it'll achieve little more than making politicians look good in media?

joe_padavano

The government isn't "forcing" you to buy anything. Unfortunately people seem to only want shiny new items. In the nearly 50 years I've been driving, I've purchased exactly one new vehicle (my 1999 crewcab dually), and then only because I couldn't find a used one that wasn't beaten into the ground. I just replaced it with a 1980 GMC.

H/o

I doubt that's realistically possible. While the technology might be there it's that far advanced yet to make it a viable option based on all elements involved. They had a group from MIT that invented a recharging type strip they could implant on the highways but the cost would have been so high it couldn't be done financially. No way this happens by then, IMO.

jensenracing77

This will be repealed or scaled back to some degree if not completely. Sadly, this will drive up the cost of used cars as it gets closer and closer up until it is scaled back. It is not just automobiles, Your refrigerated food trucks are being pushed into electric. Not only does the power grid have to be upgraded to handle EV's, it also has to handle food delivery, and many other things they are pushing. In 2028 you can't buy a generator either in California. It is easy to see why people are leaving California. All my family that was in California has left there and all their friends are trying to leave there. Most of my off road friends out there are also leaving.

blakes7

Same here, for over 30 years of driving, only one new truck, a 2001 Dodge Durango. But nothing lasts forever, eventually one needs something newer. When only electric cars are available, even as used cars, they’re more expensive and one needs a charger, has to maintain an older electric car that needs expensive batteries replaced, where an engine well maintained could last a long time. But government FORCING this on people? Create incentives, encourage, but the American way is to resist government force. That seems to be dying, though, since so many people were happy to comply with Covid lockdowns and mandates that achieved little, and cost quite a lot.

joe_padavano

Despite what many articles may claim, the CA law does not mandate electric vehicles, only ZEVs. Hydrogen-fueled ICE vehicles can comply with that madate, as an example.

HighwayStar 442

One only needs to see the reservoir in the western states. And in many other parts of the world. Wild floods in others. Melting ice caps. Climate change is happening! Nature made or man made. Or both. The cost is life on this planet for future generations.

City of St George and Utah state government. Have been pushing a $2 billions + dollar pipeline from Colorado to St George. A140-mile-long pipeline over the Rocky Mt. With many pumping stations. From the Colorado river. That is at a record low level.

joe_padavano

One can argue that we have much better monitoring systems available today, but this graphic is a pretty telling summary of hard data points from 1880 (the beginning of formal record-keeping on global temps) to today for global average temps by month. Spend 30 seconds to watch it.

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_res...limate-spiral/

Bfg

The sky is falling!

HighwayStar 442

I have always question authority, my whole life. And do not trust any government. I do trust most science. And the 65 years on this earth. What is going on in the environment. Is not sustainable

US government, Clean air act. back in the late 60's. Did make a huge improvement to the air quality in NYC. And many areas in the USA. More needs to be done on many fronts .

And before you tell me china is the biggest polluter. Why should we care. Two wrong don't make a right. China is screwed anyway, so corrupt. I do not see commissum lasting a few more years. in china.

jensenracing77

One can also argue if it is man made or natural occurring. We were in an ice age at one point in time according to scientist and there was no man made climate change that warmed things up from there.

joe_padavano

OK, so what "natural" events would cause it? Frankly, whether it's natural or not, it's still potentially a problem. I'm also curious about the rise in the early 1940s. I wonder if there is a correlation to WW II.

jensenracing77

Whatever caused us to warm out of the ice age.

HighwayStar 442

Was, I believe was predominantly media based. We were going into an ice age.

blakes7

Whipping up hysteria buys votes for politicians, who then use power to enrich themselves, their donors, and their political allies. For 30 years we’ve been hearing the world will end in 12 years, before that was a looming ice age and an overpopulation crises. Just because people go on TV and say something in grave tones doesn’t mean it’s absolutely correct, if not completely wrong or made up. Always remember that politics is show business for the ugly.

lshlsh2

I don't doubt climate change. However our climate has not ever been stable. The sun is not stable, Our climate has been much hotter and colder. Mars also has been slowly warming along with us. Mother Nature will win. We will adapt or be replaced like the dinosaurs. People are stupid and self centered if they think we can control nature.

jensenracing77

In todays news in California. Better not plug in your car today. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/l...-heat/2975097/

Cosmic Charlie

Just For Fun"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." -- J Edgar Hoover

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." -- Joseph Goebbels

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby July 1971 executive director of CIA.

"We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" -- William Casey CIA Director 1981-1987

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.” -- President Harry Truman

Pompeo CIA Director 2017 - 2018 - "we took classes on how to lie cheat and steal" … then laughs an evil laugh

Clear Channel now owns approximately 1225 radio stations in 300 cities and dominates the audience share in 100 of 112 major markets.

Who owns the Big 6 media companies?
These top six companies control 90% of the media in the United States. Just 37 years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Now, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom

jensenracing77

When I was in grade school they were teaching that we were headed into another ice age. I am talking about the one they clamed happened 10,000 or so years ago? Why did we warm up from it?

Cruiser Bob

In the mid to late seventy’s German scientists declared the Black Forest could not be saved because of pollution, within ten years it was looking better than it had in a long time.

Fun71

Exactly what I was thinking.


I was wondering the same thing. There was a lot of bomb/fire smoke and dust in the air during that time period, along with a lot of vehicle activity on land, sea, and air.

ELY442

Now Washington State is following California.

Cruiser Bob

Can anyone explain why China second largest economy on Earth is according to the Paris Accord is considered to be a developing nation and has till 2030 to meet standards the US has to meet now

HighwayStar 442

Do not remember being taught, we are headed into another ice age. But do remember, ''Duck and cover'' in the hallways of my school. Away from windows. My teachers talking about it being a waste of time. It would just take a little more time to die from a nuclear explosion .

Normally it take 10,000's of years for climate to change. Many factors, sun, earth axial tilt, orbit around sun, super volcano, hit by an asteroid. I think man is accelerating it.

The dark ages happen,540 AD more than likely by a huge volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months, records say. Corps failed

HighwayStar 442

That was Ronald Reagan fault, he let that happen. It was not that way before him. Now we have a foreigner, Rupert Murdoch and his cronies. Brainwashing Americans for profits. Murdoch and his children have toppled governments on two continents and destabilized the most important democracy on Earth. A pox on that family!

HighwayStar 442

China's government cheats, steals and lies.
Why is China's military so shockingly corrupt? Will Xi jinping be able to control the army?

Not too long, but very interesting.

fleming442

I pose one simple question: How often is the weather person, to be PC, correct?

Koda

The largest problem with the climate change and pollution debate is that people are idiots. Education has been replaced with reading something on the internet. I very rarely copy a talking point from some talking head; what you see me type is my own thoughts, tempered by years of education and industry experience. There are several people on this thread that are also educated and experienced, but there are some who are just vomiting up someone else's talking points, and it shows.

The first point I would like to make is what I usually lead with, which is we have no control model for the earth. For those that don't know that term, it is an identical experimental setup that doesn't have the variables that you are measuring in your main model. This allows you to determine precisely the effect of what you are trying to measure. In layman's terms, to know what effect humanity has had on climate change, one would need an earth without us to see the difference. Obviously, this is impossible. Equally obviously, humanity does contribute to climate change to some extent. However, what should be equally obvious, but is ignored, is that imperfect orbital mechanics around that giant burning ball of gas that is literally a gas furnace thousands of times bigger than the entire planet MIGHT have something to do with it, or that volcanic activity that puts out more carbon dioxide that all humanity MIGHT have something to do with it.

The second point I would like to make is low hanging fruit. We, in the USA, have very many pollution controls. It is one planet. China and India have none. In engineering, when you are trying to fix a system, you go after the biggest problems first because you want the most bang for your buck. It makes sense, out of conservation of effort, to go globalist on something that matters, and I mean truly globalist, like everyone helps, not the "USA pays for it all" globalism we see these days. This affects two things. Firstly, it hamstrings USA industry. Things are cheaper in countries with less environmental control as well as lesser standards of living. Large corporations, whose loyalties are only to shareholders, go after low price points to give us substandard goods because they are cheaper. We have to put up with crappy steel, electronics that fail quickly, and chemicals that don't work the way they should because of aggressive controls in the USA, and none in the far east. The second thing that it affects is that I have to hear sanctimonious bullshit from idiot activists in the USA who protest where it is safe, and only where it is safe. If one really cared about the environment the way they let on, they would go to someplace where it mattered, even if it was dangerous. The Falun Gong practitioners will go to Tiananmen Square and hold up a sign saying Falun Gong is good, knowing that the Chicom government will arrest them, imprison them, and sell their healthy organs for a premium on the black market, and their date of execution is the date the guy needing the transplant sets the appointment. THAT'S an activist. But, instead, people cry about the USA's pollution controls that are already pretty good instead of getting serious.

Third point is that battery cars are poor technology in multiple engineering senses. A battery car makes no energy, and the only "fuel" it can receive is electric power made somewhere else. My car plant is "zero landfill." Zero landfill means you don't put anything in a landfill. So, we pay someone to collect our garbage. We don't put anything in a landfill; they do. It fits the definition. Battery cars are the same thing. Yes, they don't make greenhouse gasses for their power to the wheels, but someone else did. Sure, there's economies of scale involved, a static coal plant will make less pollution per kWh than an ICE car will, but I never hear that sophisticated an argument, it's always "BEVs are zero emission." No, they're not. Secondly, those batteries are an environmental nightmare to make.

Fourth point is we don't have the power transmission or sources yet to support national electric cars. We won't spend the money on power lines, etc., and power sources are either reliable and powerful and politically incorrect and pollutive (coal, gas, nuclear), or politically en vogue, but not really powerful, nor really not all that pollutive (solar, wind), or very large and only feasible in some areas (hydro).

Fifth, battery car performance for normal driving sucks in terms of range and charge time.

So, IF we knew we needed to cut way back on pollution, and IF other countries were doing anything at all to combat pollution, and IF battery cars didn't just shift the burden while being horrible to make, and IF we could support it with clean, reliable, cheap power, and IF we had good range and quick charging, I would support it. However, for all those reasons I don't support it. I also don't support it for one final reason, and it's the same reason I didn't support covid vaccine mandates, and that is because buying into it is being rammed down my throats by people that I don't like, and I enjoy pissing them off.

69HO43

The electrical grid is fragile, and will succumb to a huge solar flare, or two in time. When exactly that is, nobody knows. Koda was correct in the fact that there's no real money being put into the infrastructure to even fix what's fugged up about the grid, let alone be able to expand it further for charging those electric **** wagons. Then, after the solar flares, there will be no electricity at all. The wolrd will eat itself before anyone can get any semblence of a working electric grid up and available again. The world has gotten too dependent on electricity, and in the end, when it is lost, that's what's going to effectively kill us. Of course, if that happens, you won't be reading it here or on any internets. Because- no electricity.

Fun71

You are so right about that. A couple of stories:

A coworker who enjoys camping told me he was teaching his young uns how to boil water over a fire. They were amazed that water could be boiled without a microwave oven.

My Mom and I were discussing her youth and when hurricanes blew in there wasn't really any electricity to go out, so no real change in their daily lives. They had one light bulb hanging from a wire in the kitchen. Now days people think they will die if the electricity goes out.

matt69olds

Climate change is real. 50000 years ago, the spot I’m sitting in now was under a glacier. A few million years ago, Death Valley was a ocean.

What we don’t know is what is the natural rate of climate change. We only have a few hundred years of records, that’s not nearly enough to understand what’s natural.

Having said that, there is no disputing pollution. Anything we can do to limit emissions is a good thing. My problem is emissions loopholes. Things like the car crushing bullshit years ago. Seriously, allowing major industry to buy “credit” in the form of removing seldom driven cars from the road, instead of actually fixing the crap that comes of of smokestacks makes zero sense. Same with strangling out industries will ever more restrictive emissions standards, while China and India bring more and more factories and power plants online with little regard for the environment.

matt69olds

I have ZERO desire to ever own a EV. I hope lots of people buy them, more fuel for me.

My son loved his power wheel toys as a child, like most kids, they outgrow their toys.

The ICE ban will probably have no affect on me. With the exception of a Challenger in the next year or so, and a new truck (many years from now) there is NOTHING made today that I have any interest in owning. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. That means I’ll keep driving the “obsolete” junk.

Jamesbo

Well pinned sir, well pinned

After a little wait, I just installed a whole house generator. Guess what makes it run when the power goes off

"Is politics nothing but the art of deliberately lying" Voltaire

blakes7

Does anyone believe China cares about these standards, and about any "consequences" that may be imposed?

blakes7

A VERY good question.

blakes7

How would you survive in Phoenix, AZ without air conditioning? People are used to these comforts, adapting like the people of yesteryear did will not be easy.

jensenracing77

DING DING DING!!!! We have a winner!

Bfg

Very well said, AMEN!

fleming442