California Has Work to Do. A Lot of Work to Do.

The California Air Resources Board today approved the trailblazing Advanced Clean Cars II rule that sets California on a path to rapidly growing the zero-emission car, pickup truck and SUV market and deliver cleaner air and massive reductions in climate-warming pollution.

The rule establishes a year-by-year roadmap so that by 2035 100% of new cars and light trucks sold in California will be zero-emission vehicles, including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Compare that to this:

Californians are being asked to conserve power for the fourth day in a row as the state's grid operator expects another strain on the energy grid.

The California Independent System Operator, or Cal ISO, announced that a Flex Alert was extended to Saturday. The alerts have previously been issued for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

With a Flex Alert, residents are urged to conserve electricity from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. each day as energy use is expected to increase amid a long stretch of high temperatures, the California Independent System Operator said in a release.

First off, "plug-in hybrids" are not zero-emission vehicles. Defining them as such is a slap in the face of reality.

Second, California has about a million electric vehicles. (It might seem like more; I have a relative to says that Teslas are like a plague, as the percentage of assholes driving them is even higher than for Beemers.) The state has somewhere north of 30 million registered motor vehicles. While a lot of those vehicles aren't going away (cars in parts of the state last damn near forever), getting to where Newsome wants to be will require a shitload more EVs.

How is that going to work, if the summers are getting hotter and hotter, heat waves are going to be more intense and of longer duration, and people are going to be asked not to charge their cars when they're home from work?

California is going to have to improve both their electricity production capability and the electric grid and do it goddamned fast. In this day of NIMBYism and BANANAism, it's going to take a lot of litigation to get those projects approved. Thirteen years is not very much time.

I've read articles touting hydrogen-powered vehicles. Sure, hydrogen would be pretty close to a ZEV vehicle, as it owuld only emit water vapor. But getting the production plants, storage facilities and fueling stations up and running in thirteen years? Not going to happen. Everyone who lives near any one of those things will be screaming about the Hindenberg.

Add to that, the mundane issue of road taxes. They were simple to collect from fueled vehicles (x cents per gallon). But how will they collect it from EVs?

Keep this in mind: Whatever they've projected in the past for how conditions will be in 2100 as far as climate, let alone sea-level rise, it's an even bet that we are going to be there in less than thirty years. That's because for the last 30+ years, whenever there has been a discussion of maybe doing something to prevent it, the extractive energy industries have been spreading disinformation that would make a tobacco industry executive blush. We have likely passed the point of no return for a lot of the bad shit that's going to happen, even if we were magically able to to zero global emissions today.

So this is my prediction for the history books of the 24th Century: No matter what we have done since the end of the Second World War, be it going to the Moon, cure polio, eliminate smalllpox, develop computers from machines the size of a building to ones that can worn on one's wrist, none of that will matter. The only thing that people will know about us is that we knew that we were fucking up the climate, that we were exterminating other species by the millions, and we did nothing to avert any of that.