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Jeff Chestnut's avatar

The market is speaking - yelling actually. The sales are actually quite surprising considering the ev experience - cost, charging station, fires, battery life.

But then this is typic of the leftists - mandate hardship on everybody else but take a more easy route for themselves. Hypocrisy at its finest!

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Ed Merta's avatar

I agree that the EPA rule is misguided and tragically overambitious, coming as it does from a particularly apocalyptic view of climate change.

That being said, when I read the Federal Register description of the rule, linked above, it doesn't seem to mandate that vehicle sales reach a definite percentage by a definite year. Instead it looks like the rule requires engine emissions to meet a certain standard affecting pollutants emitted per mile, and do so by a certain year. So, by 2027, for example, an engine must emit no more than X grams of greenhouse gasses per mile. If that's true, then what's being mandated is not sales reaching a certain number, it's that the engines in cars available for sale must achieve a certain average amount of emissions. Which is an important difference.

Letters sent by auto dealers to the White House, objecting to the rule, also speak in terms of a mandate to produce different engines, not a mandate to reach a certain level of sales: https://evvoiceofthecustomer.com/. They say what we're facing isn't government forcing people to buy things, it's government forcing companies to make things that people don't want to buy.

I know that must seem like a useless distinction that only a left-wing troll would make. I'm not a left wing troll. I think EPA's rule is a terrible idea, just one of many to come out of this administration and the climate movement (the EPA rule shutting down fossil fueled power plants scares the hell out of me).

But isn't it important to describe those terrible ideas accurately, so we can be more convincing and so win more people to our side?

Maybe I missed something, this isn't my specialty. Thanks very much for this newsletter and content that is always food for thought, much appreciated.

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