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 c0lo on Monday August 03 2015, @09:54PM
Rather than decree it, care to provide a reason why it will not happen?
Input to feed your argumentation [cleantechnica.com] - and mind you, we are speaking of 10 years term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:32PM
Some things I saw.
1) new solar is being built but not coal or nuke
2) new built natural gas grew twice as fast as solar
3) if you include non-utility solar natural gas still wins.
4) green added 824 MW in nov
My math: from the link above 1025070 installed / 824 a month added renewable = 104 years for green to catch up to existing non-renewable install base. This is actually slower than I expected. I assume that adoption will accelerate from that rate and it will take fewer years. Green needs to step it up since we are adding non-renewable natural gas faster than renewables.
What I also see is that renewables cannot cover even the new generation capacity which means they will never catch up without accelerating the installation. However all is not grim, the install base is actually increasing and in 10 years renewable will have at least 13% of capacity. (I say at least because I didn't account for acceleration or tech improvement. But maybe that doesn't matter since everything else is improving also.)