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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 Grishnakh on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:06AM
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
About 120 years. That's roughly equal to pine trees.
Washington DC delenda est.