California Will Not Be Buying Gas-Powered Cars
December 2, 2019119 Views
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California State Government will not be buying gas-powered sedans, including Toyota and General Motors—all part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration’s effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions. The only exception is public safety vehicles.
California has recently made two big changes in the way the state government will buy vehicles.
“Effective immediately, DGS will prohibit purchasing by state agencies of any sedans solely powered by an internal combustion engine, with exemptions for certain public safety vehicles.”
Photo Courtesy of Anne Wernikoff/CalMatters
California steps forward to enforce strict rules upon vehicles that state agencies may buy as greenhouse gas emissions rise. There will be two changes: state agencies can’t buy cars solely powered by an internal combustion engine, and state agencies can only buy vehicles that adhere to CARB’s standards.
DGS, or the California Department of General Services, helps state government serve the public—including through services such as environmentally friendly transportation. The first big change is that state agencies can’t buy gasoline-powered sedans. Only some public safety vehicles will be excluded from the rule.
Secondly, state agencies can only buy vehicles that accept the California Air Resources Board (CARB)’s power to set greenhouse gas and zero-emission-vehicle standards. The first rule is effective immediately and the second will begin in 2020.
State agencies may only purchase vehicles from manufacturers that accept California’s own air pollution standards, however, this is something the Trump administration is against and trying to revoke. The Trump administration wants to lighten fuel economy rules and argues that cars will be cheaper and drivers will be safer with lower efficiency standards.
Some car manufacturers such as Honda, Ford, BMW and Volkswagen have made deals with California agreeing that they will follow California’s air pollution standards. These states follow CARB fuel-economy rules. Fiat, Chrysler, Mazda, Toyota and General Motors, on the other hand, have sided with the Trump administration to weaken California’s regulatory power. Meaning, electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius Prime and Chevy Bolt will not be considered when the state purchases vehicles anymore.
California has been fighting the Trump administration’s efforts and has even filed a lawsuit to stop the revoke of California’s waiver, which sets its own greenhouse gas and zero-emission vehicle standards. On California’s side stands 22 other states, the District of Columbia, and two cities. They have filed lawsuit to prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from taking away state emissions authority.
Photo Courtesy of Mike Blake/Reuters
A California resident fills up their gas tanks at Costco Gas Station, located in Carlsbad, California. Carbon emissions continue to rise and California intends to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, though the strict changes being made are causing conflict with the Trump administration.
“We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: California will not back down when it comes to protecting our people, our health, and our environment from preventable pollution,” announced California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as he led a multistate coalition to file the lawsuit.
“Car makers that have chosen to be on the wrong side of history will be on the losing end of California’s buying power,” Governor Gavin Newsom expressed in a written statement. “In court, and in the marketplace, California is standing up to those who put short-term profits ahead of our health and our future.” Newsom declared.
Conflict between California and the Trump administration continues to carry on. California has, for decades, requested and acquired many federal waivers for stricter tailpipe pollutant standards, however, the federal government hasn’t always permitted these waivers. Currently a 2008 waiver created partly from a deal by President Barack Obama is in effect. It tightens emission standards throughout the nation—and was planned to stay in effect until 2025.
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This is completely and utterly ridiculous. We live in a system that all but forces us into these unsustainable lifestyles, and no one is doing anything about it. It’s all well and good to expect people to not drive, but they won’t because they have no alternatives. Right now, people have to make long commutes to jobs, and they can’t use mass transit because it’s so hard to access here for a lot of people. The distance of these commutes makes bicycle use woefully impractical, plus people would have to wake up earlier because they would spend more time getting to work. And time is not a luxury the average American can afford. So yeah, you can tell people to stop driving 10,000 times, but they’ll still get in their cars every morning because they have no real alternative. If we want real change besides the actions of a few individuals, we need to tear society down and completely rebuild it.
shifting the blame onto the Average Joe for simply trying to survive in today’s society is counterproductive and moves accountability off the fossil fuel lobbies and governments paralyzed by partisanship.
Individual action is very important, but it just isn’t like systemic change. Systemic change that won’t happen because of how partisan an issue climate change is. It is an outrage that significant action – indeed, any action at all – is dependent on a Democrat-majority government in Washington.
The best we can do is hope that a Democrat – any Democrat – is elected to office, because the alternative (a 2nd term for Trump) will destroy any chance we have of reaching 1.5C and staying there.
If it’s any consolation, though, human civilisation will most likely survive in some form or other, according to the scientist at ClimateFeedback.org, a fact-checking website. Here’s the link:
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/iflscience-story-on-speculative-report-provides-little-scientific-context-james-felton/
It will still get pretty ugly, though, even if the worst-case scenario in David Wallace-Wells’ article “The Uninhabitable Earth” does not come to pass (its scientific credibility was also deemed “low” on Climate Feedback).
Here’s another link, explaining what’s wrong with Wallace-Wells’ article:
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/
even under the worst case of climate change, Earth will still be far more habitable than anywhere else in the universe. That said, the next few
decades, centuries, and millenia will not be pretty. we are in a rough patch in human history, the era of the Doomsday Clock and the global catastrophic/existential threat, where the slightest misstep could civilisation or mankind itself to fall and meet a premature doom. the likelihood of human extinction is at its highest ever, but fortunately it’s still quite low. But if something happens, not only will we be killed, but so will all our potential descendents. It is more likely the human race will be killed by our own activities than by natural occurances, at least for the next few centuries.
Civilisation – and the human race – has a right to continue existing until its eventual collapse or extinction. To protect that sacred right of the human race, we must do everything to lower the likelihood of extinction even further.
The future we could lose to such a collapse is full of potential and progress. That, in and of itself, warrants more action than is being taken.
Just as a catastrophe is not as bad as an apocalypse, so too is the collapse of civilisation not as bad as human extinction. But something tells me there will still be humans – and some form of civilization – in 2119. it will definitely be different, but it will still be there.
But hey, buying municipal vehicles that are electric is a definite start.
This type of thing sounds perfect in thought, but in practice it isn’t as good as you might think. To start California doesn’t have the infrastructure in renewable energy to be moving everyone to solar even after spending 57 billion dollars of taxpayer money. With a taxpayer investment of 57 billion dollars that only got california to producing 11.8% of its power as solar. If the government wasted more of its money on ” zero emission” vehicles this would only move the emissions from the engines of cars to large fossil fuel power plants, thus making the expensive investment of electric cars useless. Then perhaps the most obvious problem, the investment would raise taxes in california to pay for the electric-powered cars which do not benefit taxpayers in any way. And yes I will laugh, not at the fact that we will pass such a regulation, but at the fact that the californian people will still be complaining about high taxes 2 years later not realizing the consequences of their decisions. But unfortunately here in California we don’t learn and this will just be another bad decision that the Californian government makes.
Why can’t us Americans be more like the Scandinavian countries? Scandinavia is way ahead of us in sustainability in every way. Sweden is, after all, Greta Thunberg’s homeland. I guess the answer is because there is a substantial minority here that is under the childish impression that climate change is nothing to worry about, due to being manipulated by the big oil companies. and don’t get me started on the buying out of American politics by the fossil fuel lobby. (by the way, sorry about the monologue.)
I think it will be a big step, and I understand that it can be hard on people. But we need to get to cleaner energy usage for the better of everything, for us and for mother nature.
P.S. good luck breathing straight CO2 in less than fifty years if we don’t.
Charles, your claim of an unbreathable atmosphere in less than fifty years is beyond even the very worst-case models, which are already fairly depressing and gloomy. We probably won’t end up breathing “straight CO2” in fifty, or even a hundred, years, unless your name is David Wallace-Wells. It will, however, not be pretty. It will not be pretty by any stretch of the imagination. It’s ironic that Trump, who promised to keep out immigrants, is going to cause a vast wave of undocumented aliens because of climate change his denial causes. If we want to prevent further waves of migrants from knocking on America’s door, we must fight to stop the climate change and not act like it is not a problem. Granted, denial is more comforting, but it has no evidence to support its claims. That said though, the links I posted above should offer you some reassurance and consolation. telling people there’s nothing to worry about is harmful, but so is making them so depressed they can’t even function by telling them human extinction is inevitable. We’re in a rough patch of human history, but chances are decent we’ll at least preserve some form of civilisation, and the chances are even better that we won’t go extinct anytime soon. (the chance of extinction before 2100 is 1 in 14,000. Basically, it is higher than anyone’s chance of winning the lottery, but is still quite low. And it may not be climate change that ends the story of mankind).
But we should still take this issue seriously, as there is still that very low possibility of near-term extinction. Everything we do makes that disturbing probability even lower. Even small actions are better than no actions. One must learn to crawl before one walks, as the saying goes.