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Who's forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it's Mary Nichols. She's run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state's zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing President Barack Obama's national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplishment in a four-decade career.
Nichols really does intend to force automakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency's heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regulations today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California's famous highways. "If we're going to get our transportation system off petroleum," she says, "we've got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now."
We've seen campaigns to defend smoking and not wearing seatbelts and not getting vaccinated. Is this like that, or is there more to it?
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 03 2015, @08:34PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Monday August 03 2015, @08:46PM
Then why is there still so much petroll used?
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 03 2015, @09:22PM
The other possible answer could be that people have cars and they want to go places and are willing to pay the current price of gas and the sum total of that being the path of least resistance.
(Score: 2) by twistedcubic on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:11AM
Oil and renewables would not be on equal footing if you removed incentives. The former industry has nearly a century of head starts in incentives.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:14PM
But with any new tech it has to beat the old tech usually at the old techs own game. It is an uphill climb. DVD was better than VHS. No one wanted a refrigerator until it was cheaper than having ice delivered for their icebox. Of course price is usually the biggest impediment to adoption and these analogies are imperfect, there is a lot more infrastructure involved with new energy tech.
As it exists now, solar and other renewables are just economically lame. Someday with advances in the tech it will become feasible. But there are some HUGE gaps to make up. When it catches up I will be buying also but I will keep my extra cash for now.
(Score: 2) by Translation Error on Monday August 03 2015, @08:56PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday August 03 2015, @09:15PM
Totally and completely untrue.
Not even in an "all generalizations are false" sense. Just in a "refuses to acknowledge any sane system of economics" sense. The US government has price supports for food crops to ensure that in the event of a war or blockade, it can feed its own citizens. This is loosely classed as "sanity". In a "purer" free market, cheaper international land values and unskilled labor would almost instantly bankrupt american farmers. People would eat today, but there would be no infrastructure for the next time shit goes down.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @09:59PM
Cars themselves aren't economically feasible by themselves. This comes up constantly in publicly funded car and airport vs completely privately owned train discussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:04PM
That argument is similar to the argument that if you have to light a fire (i.e. to provide energy to start it) then it cannot produce energy. In other words, totally bogus.
Of course the art is to distinguish combustible substances from non-combustible ones. A piece of wood won't too easily start burning, but if you manage to set it on fire, it will give you a lot of energy. OTOH no matter how hard you try, you'll never get granite to burn.
The question is whether renewables are more like wood, or more like granite. But that cannot be answered by a simple argument like yours: You'll classify wood as non-combustible.