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posted by takyon on Monday August 03 2015, @07:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-electric dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 03 2015, @09:22PM

    by Alfred (4006) on Monday August 03 2015, @09:22PM (#217598) Journal
    Good question. I assume you are referring to the various perks that the oil industry gets. I am for the removal of all government subsidies. If you did that then oil and renewable tech would be on more equal footing. We know that green tech (in its current form) can't exist without subsidies and it remains to be seen if oil could exist or not. of course if the subsidies are gone (and corporate tax breaks too for good measure) then taxes could go down and we could probably afford the impending hike in gas prices.

    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.
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  • (Score: 2) by twistedcubic on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:11AM

    by twistedcubic (929) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @06:11AM (#217789)

    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

      by Alfred (4006) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:14PM (#217894) Journal
      True, hence I said "more equal."

      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.