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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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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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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.
Banning the chemicals that were eating a hole in the ozone layer worked pretty well, as a quick relevant example, and that ban was global.
The ban would not retroactively remove cars, it would ban the future sale of gas cars by a certain date. This would be like Reagan saying "In 10 years we will be drug free, and drugs will be illegal then.", then providing a pathway for people who are struggling with addiction (in the car case I'm not sure how much 'treatment' would be necessary, electric cars are getting cheaper and car companies are making more electric ones anyway).
Obviously a person addicted to opiates has little choice in their addiction, it isn't as if they make a clear headed decision every time they use, and there isn't an alternative that is the same but legal. Like the ozone eating chemicals, on the other hand, the type of car you buy and drive is absolutely a choice, and for the vast majority of miles traveled, you do not need one type of car over another. For the specific scenarios you do, gas cars sold before the target year and ones sold in other states are still available.
The argument you made is far more accurate if all cars were banned under the law, but that simply isn't the case. It was banning the future sale of them in the state. The eventual death of the gasoline automobile is both necessary and inevitable (to personal electric vehicles, or some other transportation), and the timeline is all we are arguing over here. California wanted to speed the timeline up to help the climate, the extinction speed runners felt like that would hurt Exxon mobile, so they blocked it.
Less cars makes public transport better, buses can run faster and to a more reliable schedule. It was cars clogging up roads that resulted in the decline of most tram systems.
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.