“It was bound to happen. After skating through the summer without rolling blackouts, Californians on Wednesday were told to raise their thermostats to 78 degrees and avoid charging electric vehicles during peak hours as a heat wave grips the state. Good thing new gas-powered cars won’t be banned until 2035.”
– Wall Street Journal ($).
In my view, the idea of making people rely on electric vehicles (EVs) and then curbing how much power they have, is a design feature, not a bug. Those of a Big Government cast of mind (most politicians) might rather like the idea of fitting “kill switches” into EVs so that a bureaucrat can disable them. By making cars costly and annoying, it also forces people to use public transport.
At its root, hatred of the car is hatred of individualism and freedom. It is hatred of autonomy, even the joys of owning and driving a vehicle. All that “car culture” stuff is just so vulgar. Lord (David) Frost, the former UK Cabinet Minister and all-round-good egg, wrote a recent article about how, as a teenager, he bought a Rush album containing the song Red Barchetta, which posits a dystopian future when motor cars are banned.
He wrote:
Cars should also be about beauty. They represent the society that made them. Communist East Germany produced the Trabant. Communist China produces Politburo-style boxes. Western civilisation produced the VW Beetle and the Mini, the Ferrari Testarossa and the E-type Jag – symbols of achievement, of individualism, of power.
And cars are about excitement. The Fiat 500 nipping around the streets of Florence. The elation of burning down the Autoroute du Midi with the Alps in the distance. The sense of anticipation of heading along the urban freeway, the towers of New York or Chicago before you, as the signs flash by and the off-ramps flicker past.
We’ll miss it when it is gone. And that time is closer than you think.
Now well into my 70s, I never thought that I’d live long enough to see the green stuff hit the fan, but I lived in hope. However, the massive increases in gas and electricity prices – for all the reasons we now know well – have brought forward that SHTF moment by about 15 years. I wonder how many people will be able to afford an EV after they receive their £5,000 energy bill? Or even be able to charge it. I wonder how many people will still fervently believe in green c**p?
I wonder how long it will be until stills start to appear in unusual places, not making moonshine, but distilling biodiesel or bioethanol out of whatever vegetation is available. Not in downtown LA, obviously, but the more rural parts of California.
Not necessarily to power some classic Mercedes that can run on something as thick as biodiesel or ethanol (although that remains an option), but to run a modified generator to keep the lights and A/C on during the blackouts and to power up the EV car that will be the only things allowed to enter the local cities EV only zones.
It’s a bleak future that too many idiots seem to be looking forward to.
Note that no one defended and praised the individual transport including car in the COVID Pandemic. Despite the car and individual transport being a great benefit in case of a pandemic.
No Government had a program to benefit individual transport while in pandemic, like getting scooters to everyone.
Or less taxes for those that travel in their car and motorcycle, bicycle instead of public transport.
Also no one criticized public transport, even full of people in pandemic.
I wonder if politicians and people on right, conservatives, libertarians can really think about anything at all that is not based in some leftist mantra.
That takes a lot of energy, to produce not very much of the product.
We can do it now, because until recently energy was pretty damn cheap. Basically there is an inverse relationship between GDP and unit cost of energy.
During the suicidal scamdemic, and around this local specifically, busses ran according to the normal timetable but with one occasionally more people on board.
Those who purport to hate cars generally hate them for other people and can always find some rationale as to why they should/will be able to keep theirs.
The milk float cultists who oozed such smugness even a year ago must surely see the price hikes/restrictions that are coming down the track.
Like rejoiniacs though, the last thing they are going to do is admit they are wrong.
I can afford all the petrol I need, even at £3/litre and won’t be reducing my mileage by even a Planck length.
If you are struggling with fuel costs, you have my sincere and genuine sympathies.
If you have a milk float and find you can’t afford to charge it. I can do nothing more than laughter my cock off!
Those who purport to hate cars generally hate them for other people and can always find some rationale as to why they should/will be able to keep theirs.
The milk float cultists who oozed such smugness even a year ago must surely see the price hikes/restrictions that are coming down the track.
Like rejoiniacs though, the last thing they are going to do is admit they are wrong.
I can afford all the petrol I need, even at £3/litre and won’t be reducing my mileage by even a Planck length.
If you are struggling with fuel costs, you have my sincere and genuine sympathies.
If you have a milk float and find you can’t afford to charge it. I can do nothing more than laught my cock off!
I tend to think that is the actual purpose; that is, to get the proles and underclasses off of the roads that should rightfully belong to the elites. Those elites are getting awfully sick of having to wait in traffic like a commoner.
I suspect that the wealthy Watermelon Lib’s ideal world looks a lot like pre-revolutionary France – where the workers and lower orders had to clear the roads to make way for the aristocrats carriages.
And if not – how would the green policies of the Left look different if that was their aim?
California presently imports one third of their electricity from other States – losing a vast amount of power over hundreds of miles of wires (so much for being “Green”). There are already rolling blackouts in California. Hello “Woke” Silicon Valley internet companies, you reap what you sow – you supported the left, and now your companies are going to be destroyed, well good riddance to you.
California is reacting to this situation by seeking to close what few nuclear power stations it has not already closed. And yet all new internal combustion engine car sales are to be banned in California by 2035 – about 14 other States are doing much the same.
I am sometimes accused of having too negative a view of the establishment – whether it is the British establishment in relation to Ireland in the 1840s (the demented idea that increasing taxation in Ireland was a good way to respond to famine “Irish Property Must Pay For Irish Poverty” – unsurprisingly the Irish economy collapsed and a third of the entire population either died or had to flee the country), or over the First World War (defenders of Haig and co are horribly misguided), or the American (and general Western) establishment right now – but no one can honestly deny that what is being done is deliberate.
Johnathan Pearce is quite correct – the agenda is NOT for tens of millions of electric cars going anywhere ordinary people want to go – the electrical grid is not being prepared for that (not in any country – certainly not in the United Kingdom).
The agenda (as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and all the rest, have made horribly clear) is to force most people into Hellish “Smart Cities” where every aspect of our lives will be controlled by a “1984” style government and pet corporations. The only private cars (most likely rented rather than owned) will be of limited range – and the rulers (the Corporate State of “Stakeholder Capitalism”) will be able to decide where we can go “sorry – you cannot enter this area, it has been rewilded – here have some plant-based-food or an insect burger, remember the idea that Soylent Green is people is right wing misinformation”, and will be able to TURN OFF the car whenever they (the computer controlling rulers) wish to do so.
The plans of the international establishment can be summed up in one word – liberticide.
As for the claims they make justifying their plans..
No – the native populations of Western countries are not expanding; in fact the fertility rate is vastly BELOW replacement level.
And – no Greenland and so on are not “melting down” we are not about to be flooded.
The justifications the international establishment use for their plans are a pack of lies.
They want to make us dependent on an electrical grid which they have not got power for – and which (a final twist) they have not even hardened against EMP, such as a major solar flare.
Indeed, and I think there are many who assumed that buying a milk float qualified them.
But it would appear not.
In pre revolutionary France, I believe the nobility and the clergy were exempt from taxes which fell disproportionately on the peasants.
“Green” is a bastard child of the worst aspects of clergy and nobility, utterly bereft of any of the saving graces of either.
luckylucky: Note that no one defended and praised the individual transport including car in the COVID Pandemic. Despite the car and individual transport being a great benefit in case of a pandemic
V. astute observation.
Indeed, and I think there are many who assumed that buying a milk float qualified them.
One idea positively touted from TPTB at the moment is road pricing, to replace the lost revenue from fuel duty. To dynamically price road use, they will need to know what and where all vehicles are. You’ll be tracked 24/7 by big brother and you’ll be happy.
@Jimmers
A masturbatory fantasy they’ve had for a long time.
What sort of real world clusterfuck it would be if they actually tried?
Maybe we’ll find out.
Wonder who will try it first?
That’s what they think. EVs and actual kill switches might be new twists, but they’ve been operating on this basic principle since the ’80s. And has it worked? Are people leaving their cars at home – cars they’ve spent tens of thousands to buy, and continue to spend thousands on just to keep them on the road (mostly on punitive taxes and charges) – and taking the bus instead?
No. No, they are not. Oh, there are a few cranks around the edges; there are definitely more cyclists menacing the pedestrian public by riding their vehicles on the footpaths (encouraged by the authorities), but car ownership has continued to rise relentlessly. And if you own a car, even if it’s awkward and inconvenient, you’re not just going to leave it at home and use an even more awkward and inconvenient form of transport.
A car takes you from where you are to where you want to go. Public transport takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to go. You can’t change that.
“Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?” as PJ O’Rourke wrote.
Quite a lot as it turned out, Peej.
[CAPTCHA: Motorcycles. Skynet knows.]
“Also no one criticized public transport, even full of people in pandemic.”
Well everyone had a mask on so it wasn’t a problem.
Jimmers @2.04
Seriously, the government couldn’t pull off road pricing. Imagine the clusterf**k!
This is as much crankery as from those who want to ban cars. Plenty of people use public transport by choice; I do so myself (oh dear, now I’ve revealed that I’m a crank not worth listening to). Public transport is useful for many reasons, such as when you want to visit the dentist and will have an anaesthetic it’s much more sensible to travel on public transport. For some people it’s adequate for work, if you live in a city and work in a city. On public transport I was able to read in the morning and think about the day ahead and be primed and ready for productive work when I reached the office while my colleagues that drove in from less than a mile from the office arrived sleepy-headed and unproductive. Some of them took 2 hours before they really joined the work day in mind as well as body. I work remotely now but I used the bus to nip into the city centre for a haircut the other day, and I also use it frequently for a visit to a small supermarket. The service in this area, sometimes considered unreliable, is still adequate for me to get on a bus, reach the supermarket, do a quick shop, walk back to the bus stop and catch the bus home and be back home all in about 20 minutes. It’d take just as long in the car.
Alex, I didn’t say it wasn’t useful. I presented the reason most people prefer personal transport most of the time.
I don’t even have a driving licence.
@Alex, Sam Duncan
There really is no reason why there can’t be good public transport and excellent roads and private cars.
It absolutely is not one or the other and nobody should ever believe that it is.
Plenty of people use public transport by choice
I do also. Maybe the word “public” is a problem. I am all for options, and rapid-transit systems (such as the Tube in the UK or the MRT in Singapore, which is superb) are solutions that millions of people willingly use. In a free market, rapid-transit systems, including buses, trams, trains, etc, will have their place. (I like trains, and one of my fondest ambitions is to go on the Orient Express one day.)
The problem though is that if people use public transport because alternatives are costly and difficult, then inevitably so will public transport be horrible. Competition is good, period.
Yes, I recall the PJ O’Rourke essay about the joys of driving a Ferrari. It is among the best things the chap ever wrote. I miss him and his gonzo brand of intelligent conservatism.
Mark: I don’t disagree – I’m not advocating the abolition of public transport here – but good public transport can never be as good as even adequate personal transport. I mentioned the clear evidence for this in my original comment: after forty-odd years of governments deliberately making car ownership and usage as much of a pain in the arse as they can, more people own cars than ever before.
It’s the anti-car mob which needs to be persuaded that there’s a place for both, not motorists.
I’m completely in favour of public transport, at least when it’s good.
You hear a lot from the anti-car lobby that they’d replace cars with high quality public transport. However, you have to be completely ignoring the lack of success Western countries generally have had in recent decades with infrastructure to believe such a thing will materialise.
No, what we’ll likely get is Teslas for the rich and connected, and run down bus and train services for the masses. Air travel will become such a nightmare that many folk will just not bother anymore. And we’ll get a large diet of gaslighting and guilt tripping propaganda.
This is CARB again. The California Air Resources Board.
It was set up in its modern form by a rich kid crony of Jerry Brown, Tom Quinn, in the 1970’s Who ran it as a person as personal dictatorship. He wanted to basically ban private cars. Except for rich people like him. The rest of us had to use public transit.
Since then CARB has been involved in one scandal after another ranging from poisoning the water table in several counties with a fuel additive that actually increased pollution, using fraudulent data from a fraudulent “expert” for its diesel emissions rules, and perverse air quality rules that so reduced wildfire control measures that the state now has the worst wildfires in over 100 years. And the worst air quality in many many decades. Far worse than the smogs of the 1960’s to 1980’s.
CARB is currently spending a multi-billion $ a year tax income with zero oversight or transparency to finance projects for well connected insiders which have no measurable impact on any of the stated regulatory requirements of the agency. It is riddled with institutional and individual corruption and has been for many decades.
Thats the background for “banning gas powered cars”. They tried this back in the 1990’s as well. That fiasco let to hybrids. They only exist as a face saving measure for CARB. Its time these people were hauled in front of a court of law and sent to jail for their corruption and incompetence.
Thank you. It just shows how limited our thinking can be when we let it being framed by the Overton Window that is build by the media.
Something like nine million people live in rural UK where public transport is a joke or basically non-existent. We need our cars. Cyclists are few and far between and many roads do not support pedestrians.
The golden age of “mass transit” in the United States was actually the 1920s (think of all those Harold Lloyd films – the America they show) – when trolly cars and so on dominated American cities, I do not think such an age going to return as the population of American and (most certainly) British cities is rather more disorderly (to put the matter mildly) than it was in the past. Edmund Burke said that people either restrain themselves (moral self-restraint, the American Founders John Adams and Roger Sherman made the same point), or they are restrained by tyranny – moral self-restraint has gone away, and the totalitarian control (the restraint by tyranny) of the World Economic Forum and so on, is not an attractive alternative.
And, as David points out, what of the many millions of people who live in rural areas – are they to be depopulated (“rewilded”) in line with United Nations “sustainable development” goals – for 2030 or 2035?
To Hell with that.
People who promote mass transit, car-sharing and the like probably think that “the masses” live in the same street and work in the same factory.
This is probably what they base their ideas on.
@Duncan S
People who promote mass transit, car-sharing and the like probably think that “the masses” live in the same street and work in the same factory.
Something that has often struck me is that one group who are perhaps most strongly woke, and most strongly green are our suburban high school students. Yet every high school in the suburbs has a parking lot packed full of student cars, despite the fact that, of all mass transit systems, the school bus system is perhaps the best in the USA stopping within a block or two of almost every student, and taking then directly to the door of their destination. However, the moment they have the opportunity to use an alternative, they drop it like a hot potato.