I say this as an EV fanatic and Tesla owner, but I'm with you that outright banning ICE cars is the wrong solution.

It totally fucks anybody that can't charge at home. Do you know how many millions of people live in apartments? Do you think they're really going to shell out the cash to build EV chargers in all their parking spots?

The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger), while also having side effects of increasing the cost of all physical goods that need to be shipped. Semitrucks become more expensive to run, and while Tesla is working on a semi, it's only going to be useful for intra-city distribution, since semis used for inter-city travel are almost constantly on the road and will be driven by multiple drivers to keep moving, so they don't have time to charge.

> increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor

People who are poor are already pay disproportionally by living in a culture that requires a car.

Having been poor most of my life, my problem has not been "I can't afford an EV". My problems have been "I can't afford to live somewhere with decent public transit options."

1) Regard apartments, the government should make funds available to add charging to existing apartment buildings. It could also do stuff like add chargers to light posts, as I believe some European countries do. Also, we can normalize running extension cords out to your car as a temporary measure :). People do this with their $100k PIH Volvos in my neighborhood.

2) This is why I like the "carbon dividend" approach some have proposed. Tax people, but let some of the money flow back to the poorer members of society so that they can still live. I also think as a society we really need to question why we accept that there are just tons of poor people. Why not raise the floor a bit? Climate change (and pollution as well!) disproportionately affect the poor as well, so delaying action to fight it will hurt them in the long run.

> the government should make funds available

The government subsidizing this wouldn't change the fact that it doesn't make economic sense.

> This is why I like the "carbon dividend" approach some have proposed.

Using carbon taxes to fund welfare doesn't actually offset the negative externalities of carbon, so you haven't fixed anything.

> The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger)

But banning ICE cars is clearly even worse for those unable to afford an EV, right? Unless policy-makers think that precommitting to ban ICE cars by 2035 will lead to a sudden flurry of new EV development _that wouldn't have happened if they had just precommitted to adding large carbon taxes by 2035.

In some ways it’s worse. Even if all major car manufacturers offer EVs by 2035, how many used $2000 EV Civics will be on the market by then? I am all for going all in on EV but let’s not pretend like it’s a simple matter of pressing your thumb on the neck of the manufacturers to suddenly fix the problem. How many places in the US are specifically built to be human sized and not car sized? NYC? Maybe a few other very specific larger cities? So if you don’t want the CA economy to tank overnight in 2035 (who is going to show up to work if they can’t drive their cars?), you will need to also subsidize car prices because even ICE based vehicles are increasing in price way faster than inflation while wages are stagnant.

> So if you don’t want the CA economy to tank overnight in 2035 (who is going to show up to work if they can’t drive their cars?)

Why would it tank overnight?

Did you misinterpret the requirement? It's not a banning on owning ICE, it's a ban on selling new ICE cars. You would still be able to buy, own, and drive a used ICE.

That’s fair. The above comments were alluding to theoretically banning all ICE cars so I was I guess thinking of that when I wrote my comment.

Yes if it’s just on the sale if new vehicles that could potentially work though I still worry that the manufacturers will normalize $40k cars and use this as an excuse.

This only bans the sale of new ICE vehicles. Presumably, lower income households will continue to drive their ICE cars after this ban, and then move into an EV sometime down the road once the post-2035 used car market has enough EVs at the right price.

I genuinely wonder if the prices of used EVs with decent range (say a long range model 3 available now) will reach the same price as an older Honda Civic. I figure the batteries will be worth quite a bit still in the car. Essentially making the possibility of buying a used $2000 electric car impossible.

We built the infrastructure to pump stale dinosaur juice out of the ground in Saudi-Arabia, refine it, and deliver it to your gas tank. We built the infrastructure to bring potable water to every home.

Just because we don't have the charging stations today doesn't mean we'll never have them.

pretty sure that by 2035 we'll have more widespread charging, especially if this law is still on the books and soon coming into effect

Its really not a big deal if that's what you're worried about. Just go out of state or get some collectable car status. I'm sure there will be plenty of loopholes for enthusiasts willing to jump a few hoops. This is about changing the retail experience.

The order seems vague enough that zero-emissions could possibly include net-zero emissions but I'm not sure we know all the details yet.

I think that in general, liberals are under-appreciative (scared, even) of markets, and conservatives are under-appreciative (scared, even) of regulation and government. The fact that a carbon tax system is both government regulation-based and a market-based probably contributes to its lack of traction.

Use the right tool for the job. In this case, a free market solution (i.e. carbon tax) would drive carbon offset prices down, optimizing the solution without centralized control. What if moving fully to electric vehicles is only the 10th most cost-effective way of reversing climate change? With laws like this one, we're committing to a potentially sub-optimal solution, which means we have to find more dollars than we otherwise would need to solve the problem.

Note that the carbon tax (which I assume would include offsetting programs as the sources of carbon credits or the sink for tax dollars) does have some significant regulatory requirements and challenges; if you sell me an offset, how do I actually know that those 10 tons of CO2 were actually captured from the atmosphere? I think you'd need pretty strong regulation for there to be a workable international market in carbon tax credits, for example.

This is not about reducing carbon within CA's borders. This is about levering CA's market power to spur changes to the behavior of multinational corporations.

A carbon tax is only effective if everyone pays. Nevada doesn't care if California pays for carbon. However, if CA incentivizes electric vehicle production, multinational car companies can sell the same cars elsewhere.

Extinction of humans is not a possible result of global warming. Such a result is only put forward by people without political or scientific understanding. Worst case global warming (as in we continue to pump out and put every bit of buried accessible CO2 that's in the ground into the atmosphere) only returns us to an age of tremendous amounts of vegetation and coastal cities being flooded. It also causes wars and massive population movements, but it does not cause extinction. It might also cause advanced civilization to revert to an earlier stage of development, but Earth cannot become a Venus-like planet or anything close to it with current levels of buried CO2.

Granted this is a very bad experiment to run, and we should not do this, but it's not an existential crisis.

Well, I assume that it is a possible result. Those wars could always escalate to a nuclear apocalypse, with a combination of famine and climate disasters picking off the survivors.

That’s a silly comic. It acts as if economic activity only benefits shareholders, not people with jobs who pay taxes which fund social programs.

The same way that a sugar tax can price out death by diabetes.

Study after study proves that people respond to price incentives. If you set a price for carbon (even less than the cost to sequester it from the atmosphere), people will reduce their output.

And there is a lot of low hanging fruit we could start with before we start ripping cars from people.

Nuclear and solar and wind power plants come to mind. Cogeneration at power plants. Reducing the amount of cattle we consume/meat tax. Carbon tax.