There has been much mockery of the California’s announcement that, beginning in 2035, only zero-emissions personal new vehicles could be sold in the Pyrite State, followed just a couple of days later by pleas that owners of plug-in electric vehicles not be recharged at home during peak energy use hours, and that was followed by the threat of rolling blackouts, to avoid a major collapse of the state’s power grid. If the power couldn’t be kept on during a heat wave, and people couldn’t recharge their Chevy Dolt’s when there just aren’t that many of them on the roads, how could things be handled if only plug-in electric vehicles could be sold come 2035?

Somehow, in all of that, what Patterico used to call the Los Angeles Dog Trainer managed to use 2,351 words to actually document what all of this means.

With gas-fueled car ban, California hopes to lead the nation. Can it deliver?

By Hayley Smith and Tony Briscoe | September 6, 2022  | 5 AM PDT

It was the sort of bold, climate-focused initiative that California has developed a reputation for — an effective ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

But last week’s historic vote by the California Air Resources Board follows a number of sweeping state environmental actions that have met with varying degrees of success.

Now, as officials seek to fundamentally change California’s automotive culture — thereby reducing its largest source of planet-warming carbon emissions and air pollution — experts say those past initiatives may shed light on whether California’s nation-leading auto plan can work.

In Los Angeles, the dense smog that once smothered the city is regarded today as folklore. At its worst, between the 1950s and 1980s, the caustic haze was so thick that people could see only as far as a city block. It irritated people’s throats and lungs, and gave them bloodshot eyes. Back then, there were more than 200 days with unhealthy air annually, according to the Air Resources Board.

Since that time, there has been tremendous progress toward reducing smog and air pollution, much of it due to cleaner cars. The amount of smog-forming nitrogen oxides has been slashed by more than 50% in the last two decades, substantially improving public health.

But California’s progress in fighting air pollution has stagnated in recent decades, and the state is still home to the worst air pollution in the nation. The South Coast air basin — Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and part of San Bernardino counties — has yet to meet any federal health standards for ozone levels, including the oldest measure enacted in 1979.

“If you’re looking back 70 years, we’ve done a wonderful job,” said Joe Lyou, president of the Coalition for Clean Air. “If you’re looking back over the last decade or two, not so good. And if you’re looking at the legal standards that demand that we provide healthy air for people to breathe, we’re not doing well at all.”

Naturally, I have to cut a lot of the text, to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations, but what follows next is a brief history of the state’s efforts to reduce smog produced by exhaust pipe emissions. It notes that California was the first state to require catalytic converters. Then, in 2006, the silly cap-and-trade system was introduced.

It was in 2002 that I was part of a meeting in which a cap-and-trade proposal was made at the ready-mixed concrete company for which I worked. Because the company used flyash as a pozzolan, or partial cement replacement, it would have carbon ‘credits’ for the Portland cement that was not used. Those credits could be sold to a company which was supposed to reduce its CO₂ emissions, but found itself unable or unwilling to spend the money to do so. I saw it for what it was: not the reduction in CO₂ emissions, but simply the moving around of money.

One of California’s landmark climate programs, cap-and-trade was initially launched in 2006 with the aim of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It exceeded expectations, and in fact reached the target four years ahead of time.

In 2017, the program was reauthorized with a much more ambitious goal: Slashing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% of 1990 levels by 2030. To get there, the program uses a system of pollution credits that essentially lets large carbon emitters buy and sell unused credits with the aim of keeping everyone at or below a certain total.

Experts say it only sort of worked. While the program has remained a key element of California’s climate strategy, emissions were down about 11% in 2020 — far from the 40% goal. What’s more, that number likely accounts for emissions reductions tied to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This was a point which covered only half the issue. Yes, the panicdemic — no, not a typo, but the word I intended to use, because the biggest effect of COVID-19 was panic — would up reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but only via the mechanism of throwing millions of people out of work.

Despite California’s green reputation, it remains the seventh-highest oil producing state in the nation, extracting about 358,000 barrels per day, according to state data.

However, oil production has been declining for decades, and the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, reported that “more permits have been issued to plug and permanently seal existing wells than to drill new ones since 2019.” The agency issued 564 new well permits in 2021, down from 1,917 in 2020 and 2,665 in 2019.

Some experts said that’s not aggressive enough.

“This transition can’t happen too slowly, because there is a climate crisis, and there are significant public health impacts on frontline communities,” said Bahram Fazeli, director of research and policy at Communities for a Better Environment.

Although there are ambitions to phase out California’s oil and gas production completely — most recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom set his sights on 2045 — there has yet to be an official deadline such as the one for the gas car ban.

Just like the panicdemic, reducing and eventually elimination petroleum production in California doesn’t mean that gasoline and diesel will not be used; it simply means that more of the state’s residents will be thrown out of work. Perhaps Governor Newsom thinks that all of the displaced workers will simply learn to code.

For example, reducing demand without supply could mean California ends up exporting its excess oil, Meng said, while reducing supply too quickly could leave communities that rely on the industry in bad shape. In Kern County, one of the state’s top producing regions, oil and gas extraction provide as much as 20% of the area’s property tax revenue.

A few silly paragraphs then follow concerning “equity,” or the notion that trying to meet the state’s goals must not disproportionately impact disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups.

Then comes the big part.

Although phasing out gas-powered cars is one of the state’s greatest priorities, that alone won’t be enough. Driving habits must change, too, if the state expects to achieve carbon neutrality.

The state climate plan depends on motorists driving at least 12% fewer miles by 2030, and no fewer than 22% by 2045.

How, I have to ask, can the state require people to drive less, when California is the poster child for suburban sprawl?

“Highway building and sprawl go hand in hand,” said Susan Handy, a researcher at UC Davis who has studied strategies to reduce automobile dependence. “That’s true in California, and it’s also true everywhere else. When we built highways, it made it possible to develop farther from city centers than ever before. And now we’re in a situation where we’ve got these sprawling development patterns and it makes it very hard to get around by means other than the car.”

As the state’s population has risen and more cars are on the road, state officials funded highway construction and expansion to ease congestion, which ironically fostered more driving.

The only major significant decreases in miles driven occur during economic downturns and, recently, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as more people have worked remotely. However, driving has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

There you have it: even the very liberal Los Angeles Times has admitted that driving is necessary for the state’s economic health. You cannot reduce the transportation abilities of the people without making people poorer.

The article continues to talk about changing people’s behavior, but let’s face it: that means making them poorer. Public transportation is cited as a replacement, but public transportation is a burden and an inconvenience. You have to leave your home and walk to or drive to, depending upon the distance and weather, the bus or train or subway stop, ride in a smelly, dirty and sometimes unsafe public conveyance to the bus or train or subway stop, hoping that isn’t like the SEPTA station on Allegheny Avenue, and then walk or taxi from that station to where you work. Hope it isn’t raining!

Of course, the state will need multiple thousands and thousands of public car charging stations, and

plans to construct at least 250,000 public vehicle charging stations by the middle of the decade; 10,000 of which should be fast chargers, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Uhhh, the “middle of the decade” is almost here! 2025 is less than 2½ years away.

If 240,000 of those public charging stations are not 480-volt “fast chargers”, that means that people would need eight hours to recharge their vehicles. Even the fast charging stations require 45 to 75 minutes to recharge fully a vehicle that is down to 25% of battery capacity.

The state also plans to require landlords of multifamily housing units to provide residents with a means to charge electric cars, though those details are still being worked out.

Really? Great! Now, how can that be done?

There are hundreds of thousands of apartment buildings which have no designated parking for residents; how can landlords get charging stations for such buildings? More, in those “multifamily housing units” which do have designated parking places, requiring landlords to provide electric car charging facilities costs money. The Pyrite State is already one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and half of the state’s 40 million people are renters. If landlords have to plow multiple thousands of dollars into car charging stations for their tenants, rents will have to be raised to cover that cost, and rents are already increasing significantly thanks to Joe’s Bidenflation.

So much of not just California’s, but the global warming activists’ plans nationwide show two very fundamental flaws: they don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand poor people and how they have to live. California has a huge homelessness problem, and major cities which can’t keep people from living and pooping in the streets are going to be impossibly pressed to provide the infrastructure to increase electricity supply and delivery by the amount needed to meet its goals. We have already noted how the Inflation Enhancement Reduction Act’s renewal of tax credit for electric car purchases has been met with electric vehicle prices rising, because economic forces trump the good intentions of liberal legislators. California’s legislators have already voted to keep Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, open several years longer, because as much as the left hate nuclear power, the state needs the sparktricity.

It doesn’t matter how good or noble or necessary the state’s liberal leaders believe their intentions to be; reality cannot be denied, and what they want California to become is simply not something which can be legislated into existence. Construction takes time, often lots of time, and it takes money, usually lots of money.

But more, they believe that they can change the culture of the state in ways people do not wish to change. Who wants to take the bus to the grocery store, and have to lug grocery bags back several blocks by hand?

California’s car culture emerged because that was what the people of the Pyrite State wanted. But, then again, the left have never really cared what other people want.