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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 Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:19AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:19AM (#217862) Journal

    Bamboo grows faster and is a really versatile source of material inputs. You can make flooring with it, build whole houses with it, make paper with it, eat it, and even spin its fibers into tough, silky yarn.

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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:11PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:11PM (#217915)

    I would like to grow it but it sounds like the stuff will spread like crazy beyond my yard. The containment solutions online are marketed like some terrible Jurassic Park thing. "They will never escape containment!"

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:06AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:06AM (#218236)

    Yeah, but how long does it live?

    If you're looking for a way of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and turning into a useful raw material (a wood-like product in this case), then yes, bamboo is a great idea. It grows faster than trees.

    However, if you just want to plant a bunch of plants, and have them suck carbon out of the atmosphere for as long as possible (and then reproduce so their children do the same), it seems like large, deciduous trees are the better choice. They can live for centuries. Large fir trees might work too (things like sequoias and redwoods); those things are giant, and probably live a pretty long time too, though I don't know offhand. It seems to me that bamboo probably does not have a very long lifespan, so unless you plan to harvest it, it would not be a good choice here.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:40AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:40AM (#218397) Journal

      About 120 years. That's roughly equal to pine trees.

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      Washington DC delenda est.