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Pouring green Kool Aid into your tank

24 May 2023 | OP ED Watch

The Manhattan Contrarian accuses the American automobile industry in particular of being in Jonestown, a reference he takes time to explain since that bizarre cult mass suicide happened in November 1978 and memories have atrophied in recent decades. Then he says that new EPA regulations effectively ban internal combustion engines, deviously, and while car-makers must know it they aren’t saying anything. If people lack the grit to object to bad science and worse policy, can they not at least protest against their own execution instead of going oooh, what a pretty colour, what’s the flavour?

Having explained where the phrase “drink the Kool-aid” came from, the Contrarian adds that:

“On April 12, 2023 the EPA released its most recent proposed regulation of automobile emissions…. ‘Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light- Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.’ It is 262 pages long in the standard Federal Register single-spaced three-column format, thus designed to be virtually impossible to read for anyone who is not getting paid to do it. But the heart of the proposed new rule is that, over a period of a few years, it is to become difficult-to-impossible for automobile manufacturers to continue to sell any significant number of internal combustion engine vehicles.”

Naturally, he explains, “EPA never states that explicitly, and makes the game as difficult as possible for any layman to decipher.” But the critical language is as follows:

“GHG Emissions Standards.... The proposed standards are projected to result in an industry-wide average target for the light-duty fleet of 82 grams/mile (g/mile) of CO2 in MY 2032, representing a 56 percent reduction in projected fleet average GHG emissions target levels from the existing MY 2026 standards.”

With the usual practical business approach of “can’t we all just get along?” and “surely cooler heads will prevail”, auto makers aren’t howling that no internal-combustion car can achieve this standard, and standing up for their customers who want cars they can afford that work. Oh no. Instead:

“From all appearances, the manufacturers are falling all over themselves to get on the electric car bandwagon…. with no demonstration that electric cars can become a successful mass product that fulfills all the functions that IC cars can fulfill.”

His sour verdict? “The auto manufacturers seem to be only too willing to go along with a collective suicide, a la Jonestown.” And of course Communist China is itching to sell us all EVs produced under horrifying conditions.

The Biden administration is doing it on power plants too, relying on appointed bureaucrats to accomplish via regulation what they couldn’t get past elected legislators. If it were Republicans it would be called an imperial presidency. But when it’s Democrats, it’s visionary progressivism. And Heatmap is thrilled, not just by the policy but by the trickery:

“if the rule is implemented as proposed, it will help turn the American electricity system into a spring of cheap, low-carbon energy that can power the rest of the economy. Electric vehicles, heat pumps, the whole shebang of electrifying everything — it all rests on having a clean power system. That’s what this rule is trying to achieve. This isn’t the first time that the EPA has sought to regulate power-plant carbon emissions. The Obama administration tried to do it in 2015, but their proposal was shot down by the Supreme Court last year. In today’s story, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo and I report on one way the agency has tried to ‘Supreme Court’-proof this proposal — but why that makes it hard for the agency to talk about the rule’s effects.”

Also dismayed; you cannot keep these people happy long. Thus:

“Soon after he took office, President Biden committed the United States to generating 100% of its electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2035. It is part of his broader Paris Agreement pledge to slash U.S. carbon pollution in half by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels. But the EPA’s proposal would not achieve a zero-carbon power grid even by 2040, five years after the president’s deadline.”

Imagine not totally redesigning the energy basis of an advanced economy from a politician’s office in ten whole years. What a timid duffer. Maybe send the air force to bomb the existing plants or something. Or pour a lethal substance down their smokestacks. Go ahead. They’ll probably hold the lid for you.

3 comments on “Pouring green Kool Aid into your tank”

  1. A future resembling Cuba comes to mind, not because of the similar health care systems but the age of the cars that the proletariat manages to keep on the road.

  2. Do people realize that 100% of their electricity from non-carbon sources, and 56% reduction in fleet emissions, will reduce their standard of living ?….mostly because the money to do these things must first be paid for with their tax dollars, and then will be paid again in higher utility bills….only the little guy will actually pay….everyone else works on credit and how soon they can pay it back.

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