California legislates 10% Zero emission vehicles by 2001.

http://www.pbs.org/now/science/caautoemissions2.html

Now the steroid crazed gropenator Governor Hydrogen Hummer has learned the secret of California environmental politcs: What you promise is more important than what you do.

In another one of those by such-and-such a year statements worthy of Greenpeace types, the Gropenator has announced that California will cap Greenhouse gases by 2020 by which time of course, the long term effects of steroids will almost certainly have killed him.

What is more incredible is that there are people stupid enough to buy into this crap:




http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/climate_change

I guess Governor Hydrogen Hummer boy is burnishing his credentials as an environmentalist.

Of course there is no discussion of how this piece of glorious legislation will actually work.

And they are fightin' global warming without nuclear power - which is the real problem here...

**reality**

As usual JPAK hasn't a clue. :shame:

Yes, CARB did attempt to order manufacturers to make 2% of the cars they sale in the state electric by 1998 and 5% by 2001. This order got repealed in 1999 after electric cars which did make it to the market ended up being hugely expensive pieces of gobshite. Honda and GM made the best efforts but even with massive subsidies and with the manufacturers losing something like $25,000 per car they still couldn't sell many of the things. GM only offered there Saturn EV1 for lease because the batteries got progressively worse and would need to be replaced in 4-5 years at a cost of around $12,000. Neither Honda nor GM's electric cars were any where near ready for prime time.

Faced with reality CARB repealed the law and instead allowed manufacturers to substitute Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles (ULEV) for ZEV. The one upside of that fiasco was that Toyota negotiated with CARB to not build an electric car but instead to invest in what they considered a more practical alternative. Namely the gas-electric hybrid.

by current politicians for actions that must be taken (with all their attendent difficulties) by future politicians.

In fact climate change is not something that will happen in 2020. It is happening now.

Or state legislature has a long history of ignoring science and sound engineering and instead simply puffing themselves up for the cameras and making grand promises which never come true. An excellent example is the high speed rail network they promised would criss cross the state by the mid 90's. I'm still waiting for that one. An example of political pandering while ignoring science was the order that all gasoline in the state had to contain the oxygenating agent MTBE. The Sierra Club and Green Peace both lobbied hard for MTBE to be mandated while Cal EPA, most of the Water boards in the state, as well as just about every geologist, hydrologist, chemist, and environmental scientist who looked at it said it was a terrible idea.

You see MTBE is water soluble and just a tiny amount of the stuff can ruin vast amounts of water making it useless for even for agriculture. What's worse is MTBE breaks down VERY slowly in an anoxic environment like what you'd find beneath the ground. The scientists all recommended ethanol as a substitute oxygenating agent but it would have cost 5-10 cents more per gallon so the scientists were ignored. The results speak for themselves; vast amounts of ground water in the state is now unusable. The worst part if the Sierra Club had the gaul to claim that no one could have foreseen that happening. WTF?! They deliberately mowed down all the scientists who told them that this EXACT problem would occur.

It's just another reason why I have decided that most of so called environmental groups really aren't. The push for things like 10% of cars being electric or for MTBE in gasoline out of pure zeal. The problem is most of these activists don't know jack about science or market conditions so they end up screwing things up worse then they originally found it. Good intentions aren't enough; we also need sound science.