While expensive battery-powered vehicles (BEVs), such as Tesla, are uneconomic and impractical, most people could relax and ignore the hubbub about BEVs because they could always rely on using their family car powered by gasoline.
This sanguine view could be upended by the proposed fleet mileage target regulations for the 2022 – 2025 model years. These rules were supposed to be reviewed before becoming final.
The combined passenger car and light truck fleet wide compliance targets were set at 54.5 mpg, and 163 grams of CO2 per mile for 2025. With customary adjustments the actual requirement would be 46.2 mpg as shown in the accompanying chart.
Many anticipated that the required review of the proposed regulations would result in more realistic rules. But that’s not happening.
The absurdity of these proposed regulations is self-evident.
Actual fleet mileage in April 2016 was 25.2 mpg. The trend line projecting from current mileage history is also shown on the chart. Any reasonable person would accept that it might be possible to achieve the technology breakthroughs required to follow this trend line.
Obviously, the proposed mileage requirements far exceed what one might consider to be reasonable.
The EPA has shattered any expectation of relaxing the proposed rules by announcing it will make a “final determination” almost immediately, rushing the requirement for public comment to be completed by December 31. This will result in the EPA making a final determination before there is a change in administrations.
In their announcement the EPA said,
“The standards will prevent emission of some 6 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases over the vehicles’ life span.”
Behind the rule is the expectation that people will be forced to buy battery-powered electric vehicles, because BEVs will more likely result in meeting the 54.5 mpg average fleet mileage requirement. See, Collision of Mileage Regulations and Technology
The absurdity of this, however, is that the electricity used to charge batteries comes primarily from fossil fuels that emit CO2.
What the new EPA rules will actually do is force Americans to buy smaller, less serviceable cars, without the space most families need.
Once again, the Obama administration is imposing its view on the cause of climate change, i.e., CO2 and Greenhouse Gasses, and forcing Americans to abide by the dictates of extreme environmentalists.
The EPA doesn’t give a hoot about Americans.
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Nothing to Fear, Chapter 15, An Alternative Hypothesis, describes why the sun is the far more likely cause of global warming..
Nothing to Fear is available from Amazon and some independent book sellers.
Link to Amazon: http://amzn.to/1miBhXy
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