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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 Snotnose on Monday August 03 2015, @11:56PM
You're talking about a city that's over 3,000 miles from where I live. You're also talking about a sea level rise that won't affect me, my kids, my parents, nor anybody I know. You're talking maybes and ifs. To balance that you want me to spend extra money now to avoid something that may or may not happen (not saying it won't happen, saying 2100 is so far off my grandkids will be dead by then).
Hope you like rolling that rock uphill forever.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:14AM
> You're also talking about a sea level rise that won't affect me, my kids, my parents, nor anybody I know.
Unless you don't like your Orange Juice to taste a bit salty and you live in the kind of place South Beach [bleep] could consider for relocation.
Thank you for illustrating (I call Poe's Law) the effect of claiming to be one happy United People, when the US is more like a sum of its mostly-convergent selfish parts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:54AM
It sounds like you are near the West Coast where the land rises quickly as you move away from the ocean.
Seaports, however, are at sea level.
Most people get significant portions of what they consume via ships and seaports.
As sea level rises, the port(s) that serve(s) you will have to be rebuilt--even though they aren't on the East Coast|Gulf Coast (which will be clobbered even harder).
Whistle in the dark if you like.
There's some bad shit coming for you and/or your descendants.
The old saying is "Pay me now or pay me later".
...and I really like the "a system of dikes" AC who, apparently, doesn't know that water will go around the end of that thing unless you make it go continuously all the way up the coast.
...not to mention that that doesn't address the problem of ever-bigger storms, and an ever-hotter, drier climate that keep coming with climate change.
-- gewg_