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Senate Republicans Kill California’s Ban on Gas-Powered Cars
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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As a gearhead, this is the one thing that I agree with the Republicans on this one. I like the instant torque of electric cars, but I also appreciate an Asian sports car with an LS swapped in, mated to a manual 6 speed transmission. Nothing more fun than driving a tiny, manual car with a big, angry V8 under the hood. I like both and I want to have the choice to own both.
The vast majority of pollution comes from corporations. ~~Stop punishing everyday people for being a raindrop in the ocean.~~
That could've been an option if action was taken against big polluters decades ago, but we're now at the point that we need collective action to prevent our world from becoming an awful place to live in, and death for those living in more vulnerable areas.
It's not a raindrop, unfortunately.
Transportation is responsible for roughly 24% of global emissions, of which 18% is made up of personal cars and trucking.
Reducing car usage on a mass scale would be a massive help in stemming climate change, and the only way to do that is by each of us collectively using more efficient means of transport, whether that's public transport, ebikes, or electric cars if necessary.
Maybe it might be helpful if we start thinking about climate change as a war, and like in some wars past, it will require war rationing to win it. The corporations will never stop polluting as long as it's profitable, and many if not most governments around the world are now corporate captured, meaning we have few effective means of muzzling their emissions.
That leaves it up to us, as individuals, to make the hard choices for the sake of the planet. Reducing our usage of polluting cars, meat consumption (the alternative meats like Impossible are incredible replacements), and purchasing of non-essential high-emission luxury goods is one of the more powerful weapons we have in this war. It'd be a travesty not to use it.
Well maybe we wouldn't be so reliant on cars if we had decent public transportation infrastructure.
Banning things doesn't solve anything; never has, never will. Making things better/more accessible—so that you don't have to ban anything—is always the right way to go. See example A: The war on drugs.
You just got the data above that proves that banning gasoline cars will indeed help to combat climate change, and anyways slipped back to generic "banning things doesn't solve anything".
In most cases - probably. In the context of gasoline car, you see the data that transition must happen fast, otherwise we are cooked.
I dearly wish we had better public transport as well.
But in the event that it does not improve, either due to lack of political will or other reasons, that'd pretty much leave us with making collective personal choices as the only viable option again, whether or not internal combustion vehicles are banned.