I don't see much media coverage of the impending showdown over EVs

California's new EV rule means that because of their super special EPA waiver that allows only California to set emissions regulations above the EPA, and only for other states to follow the EPA or California standards, the fact that California is now moving to ban all EVs means 14 states must either all ban EVs with them, or abandon their emissions regulations above the EPA rules entirely. And speaking for Minnesota, its not going to fucking happen. It was a shitshow from 1991 to 1999 when the MPCA required annual vehicle inspections at the driver's cost and mandatory fix-it tickets, causing enough backlash for the state to abandon it. Now Tim Walz has declared we will be the 15th state to embrace California's ban on EVs, but we're at 3.2% of the market being EVs right now, the state's size and total lack of charging infrastructure outside of the twin cities makes EVs simply impossible to use, so the Walz crusade is destined to fail and the only question is how much political backlash it will cause. Which given that he's going to win his reelection by a sizeable margin is also questionable. I mean after the way lockdowns were imposed on the non-metro areas and now we're talking about making non-metro cars illegal, at some point people are going to talk about seceding and making a new state lmao

EVs are not a sustainable alternative to gas powered cars, even if we switched entirely over to mass renewable energy.

There isn't enough lithium in the world to supply the global need for electric vehicles even with very generous assumptions about battery recycling.



The ONLY sustainable modes of regular and long distance travel are rail and sea. The reason is pretty simple. They are an order of magnitude more efficient than their closest competitors. The only reason individualized mass transit has been a thing for so long is because oil was abundant and easy to access. Without something like that, the inefficiency of mass individual transit simply isn't sustainable at anywhere near the scale we have it now.

Thermodynamics doesn't care about your feelings on the subject.

afaik the lobbies in the US have made it that rail is stillborn/aborted in the US, its all cars and planes. or is this view too simplistic/wrong?

This post was edited by ferdia on Sep 8 2022 08:15am

Uhh it's not wrong exactly. They definitely did.

Fundamentally the issue is that the USA is the gas currency of the world, meaning we received an absolute dick load of foreign investment by them buying our currency. This also had the effect of strengthening our economy to the point of utter world domination.

Since we became by far the richest country the planet has ever known, we could afford to get rid of our rail network and use trucks and cars as our long-haul systems even though they are insanely bad from an efficiency standpoint. When you control the world's reserve currency efficiency can eat a dick. It's all about convenience.

Public transport as well was basically gutted for the same reason. We could just buy all the cars from ourselves and from everyone else, cost be damned.

just charge your EV overnight guys

https://twitter.com/Tim_jbo/status/1568557345525104640?t=EYTGb157C45oBSZRKriV0Q&s=19