California’s future is dark and heavy.
As such, your pocketbook will be taking the Mother of All Beatings.
It’s all thanks to the fact Sacramento politicians have the attention span of a hummingbird.
And it is made worse by tendency to simply start wildfires and then stoking them into raging infernos without thinking things through.
The Golden State is now poised to become a living laboratory of green panic.
Consider the following little tidbits.
*Electric vehicles are roughly twice the weight as gas-powered counterparts.
*To implement the initial banning of new vehicles powered by fossil fuels starting in 2035, California needs 40 gigawatts of new power.
*One gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.
*Forty gigawatts is the equivalent of 30 million homes.
*There are 12.2 million homes in California.
*For fun, toss in the fact high speed trains will consume another 3 gigawatts when they are up and running. That’s the equivalent of another 2.25 million homes
Do the math.
These are numbers, by the way, gleaned from official State of California websites.
Of course, just like with the 10 or so agencies creating and implementing water policy on California, the state agencies that generated the numbers operate in separate silos meaning they are only concerned about their little piece of the puzzle.
Either those that are at the vanguard of the green push haven’t given the impact of what they are pushing for much thought or they don’t care.
Why we know this creates a dark future is simple.
The green panic also involves replacing existing fossil-fuel — and some of them toss in nuclear for good measure — as power sources that California depends on.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last month essentially conceded this is the case.
It is why — despite hydropower being plentiful this year thanks to 14 atmospheric rivers slamming the state — Newsom pitched a plan for California to buy energy for summer loads to avoid rolling blackouts.
But wait. There’s a lot more.
Given EVs are roughly twice the weight as gas-powered vehicles, that means California’s roadways are going to take twice the pounding than what they were designed to take.
While this may have minimal impact on freeways, highways, and arterials designed to carry heavy truck traffic, it doesn’t bode well for city streets and rural roads.
Based on several sources, it costs at least 20 percent more to lay a base and pave a major arterial to handle truck traffic than it does a residential street designed to withstand little truck traffic.
That means new and resurface work for roadways will cost 20 percent more on top of inflation.
Given the condition of many streets now, you can see where this is headed.
Pretty soon we’ll all going to have to switch to Jeeps and similar vehicles to navigate the potholes and washboard surfaces.
Jeeps are legendary on how they can handle rough, primitive roads.
They start at around $32,990 for the lowest-price gas-powered Wrangler.
The all-electric Jeep is $20,000 plus higher.
Feel the pain yet?
It gets worse.
Stellantis — the parent company that owns Jeep and Chrysler — has indicated they intend to ship more electric Jeeps to California and other states that have adopted the move to ban gas-powered new vehicle sales starting in 2035.
Based on what a Delaware dealer indicated, they have been told they won’t receive regular shipments of gas-powered Jeeps because that state is following California’s lead.
What It means is simple.
In the not-too-distant future long before 2035, the new automobile market is going to be subjected to market manipulation caused by government edict.
If you think a limited number of Jeeps — or any make of a gas-powered vehicle — being available in California during the run-up to 2035 will mean they will sell at manufacturer’s suggested retail price, you must also be deliriously happy that Newsom’s edict means PG&E is replacing Costco, Sinclair, Chevron, et al as your exclusive source to fuel your vehicle.
You will also notice that no one in Sacramento is concerned these days about the 900-pound gorilla they are trying to keep in the closet.
Gas tax — by far the largest source of funding for road construction and maintenance in California — even with automatic built-in inflation adjustments will soon be in a long state of decline.
There were 14.3 million registered vehicles in California in 2021. Of those, 537,000 were electric vehicles.
Electric vehicles accounted for 18.9 percent of all new vehicle sales in California during 2023.
Gas-powered vehicles are now subsidizing EVs when it comes to road construction as well as pavement wear and tear related costs,
It won’t be too many years before it becomes so unsustainable that Sacramento will need to devise a new way of financing roadwork in the Golden State. Using a per mile tax with data collected by onboard GPS systems feeding into a state computer seems to be the obvious replacement.
All of this is not taking place in a vacuum.
Besides an energy squeeze, there are serious issues with the supply chain of key components such as lithium to make batteries.
There are also a host of other issues from power plants and charging infrastructure to a small growing number of issues involving battery fires.
None of the problems are insurmountable.
Plus we need to keep in mind there is a definite end-time to fossil fuel supplies that — depending upon the expert — have another 50 to 200 years.
That, to be honest, is why someone should listen to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s suggestion to drop the climate change moniker when it comes to fuel sources and come up with a new “marketing” phase to try and rally folks around.
It is clear that we are — in context of civilization once it was powered by the innovations of the Industrial Age — coming near to the end of the road with our ability to use fossil fuel.
The biggest mistake, as usual, was the government picking winners and losers.
With all of its perceived drawbacks, hydrogen power would have made much more sense in a number of ways given it doesn’t rely on the whims of nature — and is much less suspectable to natural disasters, acts of war and sabotage — than a transportation system relying on renewable energy defined by solar, wind and thermal for power.
