Progressive Mind Over Matter in California. No gas furnaces after 2030, and all big rigs must be electric.
Wall Street Journal ^ | September 23, 2022 | WSJ Editorial Board
Posted on 9/23/2022, 10:01:50 PM by karpov
Nothing—including cost or reality—will keep California progressives from their effort to turn the state into a grand carbon-free economic experiment. The state Air Resources Board moved this week to ban gas space and water heaters in 2030 and proposed that all big rig trucks must go electric.
Cities such as San Francisco and Oakland have passed electric-only building mandates. The air board is now forcing everyone else to get with it by prohibiting the sale of gas furnaces by the end of the decade, even though they are generally less expensive and last longer than electric heat pumps.
Come 2030, homeowners and businesses whose furnaces break down could be forced into expensive electrical retrofits. If you like your gas furnace, sorry, you won’t be able to replace it with a new one. The mandate comes as electricity rates in the state surge, and the grid wobbles amid a shortage of baseload power when the sun goes down.
Californians were told during a heat wave a couple of weeks ago not to run large appliances or charge electric cars in peak hours. Soon blackout warnings could happen during the winter. Will Californians have to avoid running hot water and heating their homes too? Even in California, it can get chilly when the sun goes down.
These grid strains could be exacerbated by the Air Resources Board’s proposal to ban the sale of diesel and gas trucks by 2040. Such large fleet operators as Amazon and UPS would have to start making the transition to an all-electric fleet in a few years. Yet the charging network and technology needed to meet the mandate is all but nonexistent.
Long-haul diesel trucks can go some 1,000 miles before needing to fill up, which takes 10 to 15 minutes.
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Despite Newsome's name climate control in California is not something 'new'. I started a long time ago.
Due to its unique climate conditions, California has long been a forerunner in climate control. I grew up in smoggy Southern California. Some days you either stayed indoors or went to the coast/beach to avoid smog.
California - ever the forerunner: On August 30, 1967, California's elected leaders came together to unify statewide efforts to address severe air pollution. Governor Ronald Reagan approved the Mulford-Carrell Air Resources Act to create the State Air Resources Board, committing California to a unified, statewide approach to aggressively address the serious issue of air pollution in the state.
Act of 1967 was enacted, giving California the ability to set its own more stringent air quality rules due to California's unique geography, weather and expanding number of people and vehicles.
The state to set its own separate and stricter-than-federal vehicle emissions regulations to address the extraordinary circumstances of population, climate and topography that generated the worst air in the nation.
-regulatory history reflects a longstanding partnership between state and federal air quality regulators during both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. This partnership has allowed California to develop and implement air pollution control strategies that have proven to be a model for other states, the nation and other countries.
Some of the innovative vehicle emission control strategies that have led to cleaner air in California include:
The nation’s first tailpipe emissions standards for hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (1966), oxides of nitrogen (1971), and particulate matter from diesel-fueled vehicles (1982);
Catalytic converters, beginning in the 1970s;
On-board diagnostic, or “check engine” light, systems, beginning with 1988 model-year cars;
Zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) regulation (1990) that requires manufacturers to produce an increasing number of ZEVs;
The nation’s first greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars (mandated by the Legislature in 2002 and approved by CARB in 2004); and California’s Advanced Clean Cars Program (2012), which reduces both conventional “criteria” and greenhouse gas pollutant emissions from automobiles.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, California cars became the cleanest in the world, and California’s fuel became the cleanest, too.
...The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, was signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger...
Its broad range of programs to reduce greenhouse gases addresses every major sector of the economy including a zero-emission vehicle mandate that will clean up the transportation sector and put close to 1.5 million plug-in or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the roads by 2025.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/about/historyLos Angeles officials had banned backyard incinerators on October 1, 1957, in an attempt to cure Southern California's air pollution problem. When I was a kid living in West Los Angeles, we had a backyard incinerator which we used almost daily. When I was 13 years old in 1957, our house had an indoor incinerator in the kitchen. Not sure if they were outlawed yet or not, but we used ours.
The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District passed Rule 4901 in 2003 stating that only gas burning fireplaces can be built into new homes.
In 2016 Southern California, in both Orange and Los Angeles counties, passed a law banning adding an open-hearth wood-burning fireplace to an existing home, due to air quality concerns. Thus any new open-hearth fireplace must have a gas or alcohol-fueled log set.
Enacted in 1992, the 20-year period for replacing all-wood-shingle roofs with less fire-prone material nearing its Aug. 14, 2012, deadline, 128 homes have yet to make the transition.
AB 1279 passed Assembly Jan 31, 2022; Passed Senate Aug 30, 2022, which codifies the state’s existing goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. Carbon neutrality means a balance between the carbon added to the atmosphere and the carbon removed.