So, Ana Kasperian has come under fire again from lefties, this time for criticizing green new deal measures like trying to mandate electric vehicles within ten years, and how this will just hurt working class people by making cars more expensive.
I have...mixed thoughts on this take.
On the one hand, I'm totally sympathetic to her take here. This is exactly what I disliked about the democrats when I was a right winger. It comes back to the idea of "good in theory, but doesn't work in reality." It sounds like a great idea to mandate electric cars, but if the technology isn't there and it just drives up the cost of vehicles with maybe a means tested tax credit to offset the costs that a lot of people are going to miss or not claim because of bureaucracy, these kinds of suggestions go over poorly with the american people.
I mean, there's a lot of conspiratorial thinking on the left that the "green agenda" is like some sort of communist plot come for our luxuries like cars. Why? Because "the left" are a bunch of power crazy authoritarians who want to impose their way of life on you (according to the right). And sadly, sometimes the left, with the green agenda, they do come off poorly. I know there is a very significant segment of the green left who wants to do away with cars and have "walkable cities" where we all take public transportation. It's why so many of them wanna spend SO MUCH on their green new deal. They just wanna full on renovate the entire country in their image, and that's going to impose a lot of inconvenience and loss of quality of life on people, inconvenience and loss of quality of life that the American public just won't tolerate.
I mean, sad to say, but America is built around cars. Our entire infrastructure is designed that way, and just shifting to a European way of doing things just isn't feasible. And honestly, I LIVE in a city with grocery stores in walking distance, and public transportation. Except the public transportation sucks, is unreliable, and WAAAAY less convenient than cars, and walking around? Uh...do you want to get mugged? Or shot? Yeah. Not the best of ideas.
Here's the thing. If I want to go to somewhere in public transportation range, I can either drive there in <15 minutes, or wait anywhere from no time to up to an hour for a bus, then ride the bus for 5-10 minutes down to the terminal, wait up to 45 minutes for another bus, and then ride that for up to 20-25 minutes before getting to my destination. Total commute time, anywhere from 25 minutes if everything goes perfectly, which puts you at risk of missing the bus, to anywhere up to around 2 hours. And you kinda have to give yourself that amount of time buffer, to account for that unreliability of public transportation. Oh, and if you go shopping, you gotta haul everything around yourself, you cant put it in a trunk and take it home.
It just doesn't work well. Sorry, it doesn't. These guys are nuts if they think Americans are going to want more expensive cars and shifting to public transportation and living purely in densely populated cities. We need policies that meet Americans where they are, and don't mandate they change their lifestyles too much. Just mandating a change when the technology isn't there at an affordable level isn't gonna work.
NOW, TO BE FAIR, I do support some level of green technology change. And I do realize the clock is ticking on climate change. Most timelines want to completely greenify our economy by 2050, even the more moderate ones (and Biden, who is being criticized here, is a MODERATE), and most want to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels by 2035. And I support that goal, in theory, if it's feasible.
I think electric vehicles are actually a good compromise between our environmental needs, and the need to greenify things. I know leftist purity tests screech at cars at all, because again, they want us all to live in dense cities with public transportation and blah blah blah, but here's how I see accomplishing the green thing in a nutshell.
The most reasonable place to greenify the economy is with the electrical grid. We wean ourselves off of fossil fuels by investing in solar, wind, and NUCLEAR, another idea that the greenies don't like because they're too morally pure for their own good, not to mention other things like geothermal where applicable, hydroelectric when applicable, etc. And only use fossil fuels where we NEED to.
THEN we focus on the car situation. Because cars are a major source of green house gas emissions. And them being gas powered...is a problem. We need to shift to electric cars over the long term, because people LIKE cars, but we also need to be green in the process.
Which does bring me to my criticisms of Ana's position. Ideally, green tech will get better and cheaper over time. Perhaps in anticipation of upcoming deadlines, businesses will look for cheaper alternatives. Right now, electric vehicles are kind of a thing for the rich. You got these upper class yuppies in places like San Francisco buying them after making $150k at their jobs, and yeah, that's why most people don't like them. Some conservatives are against them out of spite, remember the rolling coal thing? Yeah. But yeah, it's not affordable.
To be fair though, they're only about 40% more expensive than current cars, and most new cars are insanely priced anyway. While the cost of electric cars is going up, not down, the same can be said of all cars. if there's any advantage of that horrifically inefficient public transportation, it's that it's cheap relative to cars. But that's the thing. Public transportation is the option for poor people in connected cities to use. It would be used by people who live on my theoretical UBI. In the real world, it's used by people making minimum wage jobs and the like. Anyone who is middle class and above uses cars.
And yeah. Unless we can greatly cheapen the cost of these new cars, and have budget options aimed at budget consumers, this idea of electric cars being mandated is gonna be a bust. And it will turn the american people against the green agenda. And we quite frankly dont have the time to kill any and all movement on this front for decades to come. Seriously, we twiddled our thumbs for 40-50 years, and it's getting to the point we really NEED to be DOING SOMETHING about this issue.
All I can hope is that any pain associated with buying electric vehicles relative to gas vehicles is relatively short lived and by the time we get to the 2030s there are much cheaper options.Heck, it's possible long term that gas prices will go up and force people to electric anyway. Although that would be a loss for the left as well. Anything that costs people economic well being is going to be opposed by the majority of the country. The left needs to be for solutions that make their lives better. Ideas that inconvenience them, or make them worse, even if relatively minor ways, are going to be opposed. This is why the country turned on Carter. Remember him telling people to wear sweaters and turn the heat down? Yeah, remember what happened next? Also, remember what happened during covid during the restrictions? Yeah people freaked out and biden went hard center and moved away from that stuff ASAP to the point that now a lot of lefties think covid restrictions were a "mistake."
So yeah. The bottom line is this. Any ideas that put the burden on the american people are not going to be well received. We need a climate policy that threads the needle between progress and making things easy and convenient for the majority of the american people. Otherwise, they will turn on these ideas, and slow progress in the long term. And the right will win. We don't want the right to win. We spent 40 years crawling out of a dark age for the left, and if we go too far in pushing this stuff we'll be right back where we started.
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