SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.