Maskachusetts takes aggressive action against climate change…

by philg

… starting 14 years from now: “Massachusetts to Ban Sale of New Gas-Powered Cars by 2035” (Car and Driver).

Climate change is an existential crisis, which is why we are going to do nothing about it (other than abandon public transport in favor of private cars) until 2035.

I am waiting for our legislature to ban the sale of Wright Flyers.

How much will this help to heal Planet Earth? At least for now, a battery-electric vehicle actually emits more greenhouse gas over a 10-year life than a plug-in hybrid:

Note further that driving a small conventional gas-powered car would actually result in less emission of CO2 than driving a mid-sized electric car. Also note that the difference in lifetime CO2 emission between a virtuous Tesla and an evil non-hybrid Honda Accord is minimal. If you hate emitting CO2, #StayHomeSaveLives and/or ride a bike.

Related:

  • from the October 2020 debate between Virtue and Evil: Biden: Climate change, climate warming, global warming is an existential threat to humanity. We have a moral obligation to deal with it. And we’re told by all the leading scientists in the world that we don’t have much time. We’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to 10 years. (My comment on the foregoing: “Humanity is facing an existential threat? Why is Biden worried about Covid-19, which kills as many people as a few bad flu seasons even when a country mostly just gives the finger to the virus? Why not take the $trillions we’re still spending on Covid-19 and instead spend it on preventing Earth from turning into Venus?”)

24 thoughts on “Maskachusetts takes aggressive action against climate change…”

  1. Wonder how big this is going to make GM’s next bailout. The modern religion is to do as Calif* does. Would expect all states to ban gas cars & copy Calif*’s tax structure soon. The car makers are just going to live on economic stimulus packages & all the electricity is going to come from Canadian nuclear power plants.

    There are going to be a lot of ancient Chevies being indefinitely manetained just like Cuba, with 1 2018 Honda minivan of course.

    • Pavel: Why do you say that IEA is corrupted by Big Oil? https://www.iea.org/about/leadership shows a bunch of people who’ve gotten their paychecks for touting “clean energy” and impending climate doom. https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-turk-3683a414a/?originalSubdomain=fr is the executive director. He worked in the Obama administration’s DOE and was “Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change at the U.S. Department of State” under Obama. I wouldn’t expect a person with that history to support digging up oil and setting it on fire.

    • philg: IEA was created in 1974 to ensure the security of oil supplies, its job is to make sure that the oil flows. In Canada, the IEA predicts that in the next 25 years oil sands production will increase by approximately 2.5 million barrels per day. The oil sands are in decline, Alberta could look like West Virginia in the next 10 years if they do not find another source of economic growth. The IEA does raise climate changes issues and alternatives to oil, but it still tends to be biased toward keeping the oil production expanding. Money talks, so finding out the source of their funding could point toward their bias.

      Here is an example, Dr Fatih Birol (IEA executive director) tends to change his message depending on the audience he is addressing.
      https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/07/27/green-talk-iea-still-gives-comfort-oil-gas-producers/

    • Pavel,
      What’s wrong with West Virginia? It is really nice place to live IMHO.
      Great people and great history, it separated from Virginia in Civil War; West Virginia supported Union and opposed slavery. On the other hand Canada travel is cumbersome: despite having oil sands, just oil and American car manufacturers gas stations are far away from each other and refueling must be planned in advance, unlike in West Virginia. Or has it been fixed recently? Do Canadians already drive EVs? How many charging stations are there in Canada. Some West Virginia malls have EV charging stations.

    • Low skilled immigrant: I am mainly using West Virginia as an example of a region who’s economy was heavily dependent on mineral resources, coal production and shale oil. The decline of coal production and oil prices have caused economic hardships for the state. Nothing against the people or the history of West Virginia. This is similar to what is currently happening in Alberta because of the oil price collapse. Alberta has also great people and some of the greatest national parks in the Rocky Mountain Range in Canada.

  3. I think MA is being very conservative with their mandate because they are waiting for John Kerry to be appointed as the Climate Czar and do not want to steal his spotlight before the show starts, as it were. We have to wait until he crystallizes his policy initiatives and the level of federal funding and impetus to accelerate the transition materializes, including large amounts of money dedicated to “Resilience”.

    All of the big things have to wait until the Trump Administration has been eradicated from our government and everything has been thoroughly disinfected.

    This is a bit like the vaccine rollout: notwithstanding your points regarding efficiency, the most important lesson I learned during the MA Senate elections this year is that both Ed Markey and Richard Neal are very enthusiastic that during the next Administration, “The Age of Incrementalism is Over!” to quote Senator Markey. We have to wait until the new team finds its legs before anything can be said on the pace of vaccine rollout, climate change blitzkrieg, and many other imperatives.

    https://www.mass.gov/info-details/climate-change-resiliency

    I think you should revisit this topic in six months.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/john-kerry-biden-climate-czar

    “So what happens next? And how do you believe a Biden administration would take on these challenges?

    We can manage much of this. If we get ahead of the curve and getting ahead of the curve means building out infrastructure that adapts and mitigates. It means helping populations to harden their physical structures, to be able to manage whatever the transformation is. It involves really trying to take seriously what the scientists have said.

    The scientists gave us 12 years three years ago. We’ve squandered those three years. We had 70 degrees in Antarctica. If we don’t take those warnings, we’re doomed.”

    • Alex, I would predict that the most difficult aspect of climate change will be keeping the food supply going. All it would take is a 10% to 20% drop in agriculture capacity and the corresponding food shortages to cause wide spread collapse of society resulting in a “Mad Max” world.

      If the US has food security, parts of Florida and New Orleans can always be moved if the sea level rises.

    • @Pavel: If America suffered a 10-20% drop in agricultural capacity, we would still have plenty to feed large parts of the world, including ourselves, and we wouldn’t have to subsidize farmers who are destroying their crops or using corn to produce ethanol. If we got to 40 or 50% you’d have a better case, I think. If anything, right now America produces too much food so cheaply that the government has to prop up the market because the farmers can’t earn enough to live.

    • Pavel: Wouldn’t a warmer climate and more CO2 result in increased agricultural capacity? Huge portions of your favorite country (Canada) and Democrats’ essential country to blame (Russia) would become economic to farm. #Science tells us that plants love CO2.

    • philg: More CO2 will benefit plants, but the overall negative effects will outweigh the positives.
      “drought and heat stress—would likely overwhelm any direct benefits that rising CO2 might offer plant life”
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/

      From Canadian Government website
      “Extreme events like the 2001 and 2002 droughts and floods of 2010 and 2011 can have a devastating impact on crop yields where yields could be reduced by as much as 50% of the average yields during normal or more suitable growing conditions.”

      https://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/agriculture-and-the-environment/agricultural-practices/climate-change-and-agriculture/climate-scenarios-for-agriculture

    • philg: Let’s go with that Canada’s agriculture output increases due to climate change and is not effected by drought and etc. If everybody else around (except maybe for Russia), experiences massive crop failure, what is going to happen? Canada will get invaded and occupied because most likely Canada’s agriculture increase will not make up for the drop in the rest of the world.

  5. Also, circling back around to my earlier tongue-in-cheek summary of the EV situation:

    “It’s the batteries, man, the batteries.”

    I haven’t seen anything in the past year that has given me any new confidence that a breakthrough has been achieved in terms of battery recycling. All of these vehicles are going to be constructed with more than 1,000 pounds of onboard ballast in the form of Li-ion batteries, with all the attendant raw material, manufacturing, recycling and disposal problems. But where is the big breakthrough to close the loop, so to speak?

    Are we just going to tell the Congolese to have 5 more kids each so they can break rocks looking for cobalt while we drive around in our shiny new EVs at massive scale?

    https://www.ft.com/content/c6909812-9ce4-11e9-9c06-a4640c9feebb

    • Alex: Sandy Munro is predicting that the battery issues are going to be solved in the next couple of years, if they have not been already solved with Tesla’s new battery. He is predicting the end of the ICE age by 2030.

      The amount of Cobalt in the batteries is getting lower and lower with each new generation.

      Sandy on the new battery.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_yp1jJMDPg

      Another interview with Sandy
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrvvVSwEgmE

      Sandy’s youtube channel
      https://www.youtube.com/c/MunroLive/videos

    • @Pavel: He’s a smart man, and I liked his analysis of their new battery tech. I thought the reaction to Battery Day was misplaced at the time (overly negative) and Musk had a solid showing that day, for reasons he talks about. He doesn’t mention much about the recycling and lifespan of those batteries though. Maybe in a different video. In the second video, I think he was right on target with his diagnosis of what’s happened to America in terms of getting young people into the trades vis-a-vis our competitiveness with China.

      “It’s left us in a really bad way….and I think that that shortage is going to basically stymie our ability to get back what we gave to the Chinese. And quite frankly the start, if you like, of getting people into the trades should be in public school, in grade school…unfortunately those teachers don’t understand manufacturing. All they know is, “It’s dirty.” And so consequently, they wind up getting degrees that are useless…Our school system basically turns its nose up at tradespeople, they just think that they’re useless…”

      That’s where we’re really in trouble. Whether or not you’re a Tesla fan (or stockholder) there are a lot of other good things to listen to in that second (longer) video. As you get out toward the end of the video he also talks about “micro” nuclear reactors and even … wait a minute here, I might get banned … fusion. I think we should be talking a lot more about small nuclear reactors but fusion has always been “just ten years away!”

      I’d really like to see him do a video dedicated exclusively to the recycling question. We’re not going to be dumping these new Tesla batteries bound together with epoxy into landfills, or at least we shouldn’t be doing that by the tens of millions.

    • @Pavel: I will say also what I don’t like about Tesla: what seems to me their desire to make their vehicles impossible for anyone but Tesla to service. I belong to a couple of discussion forums devoted to the Ford Escape Hybrid that was manufactured from 2004-2012 (I have a 2010) and people fix these cars! Or at least they try to! 😉

      There have been more than 46,000 posts to the forum over the years. Recently we were discussing engine block heaters to keep the ICE engine out of cryogenic range in the really cold days of the winter, because that helps the battery warm up faster and get into its optimal operating range, extending its life. It turns out you can retrofit one for about $50 and an hour’s worth of time, which is a good investment.

      How many posts in the Tesla forums at the same site? A grand total of 15. That gives me the impression that people just do not work on their own Teslas, at all.

      Where I live, there are hundreds and probably thousands of people who work in automotive repair. If we’re going to transition to EV vehicles and kill those enterprises off without anything to replace them, all those people are going to take the hit. Which is why I voted YES on MA Question 1 this year (“Right to Repair” regarding vehicle telemetry data.)

      I mean, Tesla wants to eliminate dealerships also! Everything over the ‘net. Well, every Chamber of Commerce in every town that has auto dealerships should be rightfully worried about that. Car dealerships employ people and pay taxes.

    • Alex: The closed architecture to repair for the Tesla is a real problem. As an EE that likes to repair everything myself, I am in full support of right to repair. It looks like Rich Rebuilds has figured out a way to rebuild and repair Tesla’s, there is also a growing grey market for Tesla parts
      https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA

      Without large scale EV battery recycling, the EV revolution could grind to a halt.
      https://www.wired.com/story/the-race-to-crack-battery-recycling-before-its-too-late/

      Car repair shops will still be required, body repairs, tire changes, suspension repairs and etc cannot be done over the air, although there could definitely be a decline because EVs should be more reliable. EVs should also last longer, so there could be a very good future for car repair shops keeping EVs running, but it will require a much better understanding of the controls, motors and batteries by the independent mechanics.

      I am not too concerned about Tesla using factory sales model instead of dealerships, in the past I have mostly preferred my local independent mechanic over a dealership in almost all cases. Tesla still needs mechanics in their service shops for things that cannot be fixed over the air. They cannot send you a new set of tires or replace suspension parts over the air. If Tesla is doing direct factor sales, this means they will have to hire sales, marketing people and etc, especially when VW, Ford, GM and all the other manufactures launch more competing products in the next couple of years.

      We have two cars in our family, a big gas SUV for going on long trips and recently a LG Bolt EV for all the trips in the city. The battery, motor, controls is from LG and the rest of the car is a Daewoo (GM South Korea) parts bin special all designed in South Korea. In Canada, taking into account all the government subsidies, the LG Bolt EV is about $14k cheaper than the Tesla M3. In addition the Bolt EV is not constantly connected to the mother ship and should be easier and cheaper to repair than a Tesla. What sold me on the Bolt EV, other than the lower cost, was the videos by WeberAuto
      https://www.youtube.com/user/WeberAuto

  6. Over 62 MPH in a Honda E-Hybrid, the internal combustion engine running all by itself is more efficient than the EV-only mode. The energy conversion is actually less efficient over 62 MPH and it’s not widely discussed, but the engineers know.

    • As a prole consuming transport, you will not need to go over 100 KPH anywhere. Because you’re not important enough. So you don’t need to know that. And if you find out, you’ll just hang posters of Teslas on your ceiling like people used to do with Ferraris and Lamborghinis and dream of something you could drive fast, while you wait at the Community Transport Station for your bubble car. Lol.

    • PaulG: I think this just shows how much more intelligent consumers are than academics and NYT journalists.

      https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/altima/deals-incentives-offers.html

      shows that a Nissan Altima, which is at least a slightly better car than a Tesla 3, will lease for about $290/month (add the “due at signing” amount back into the monthly payment). What about maintenance costs? Aside from oil changes, there are none! A leased car will have a warranty that runs the length of the lease. Unlike on a Tesla, the tires will last the life of the lease as well.

      It is ridiculous to say that the Tesla is cheaper when you can easily see that the Tesla will cost $525/month at https://www.tesla.com/support/tesla-leasing

      Can you make it up on fuel somehow? Not in Maskachusetts. Electricity for the Tesla 3 will cost MORE than gasoline for the Altima.

      Even if fuel is somehow slightly cheaper on the Tesla in a part of the country where gas is expensive and electricity is cheap…. insurance. The higher capital cost of the Tesla, plus the notorious impossibility of doing bodywork on a Tesla, means that the extra insurance cost of the Tesla will overwhelm any fuel cost savings.

      (Consumer Reports gives the Altima 79 points. Tesla 3 gets 78 points, which I don’t understand, having driven both the Altima and a couple of Teslas. The Tesla 3 is listed as “compact”, though, while the Altima is “mid-sized”)

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