Carmaker Volvo (“They’re boxy but they’re good.”) has announced its intention to phase out all production of gasoline-powered vehicles within two years. I am sure this is all about “saving the environments” and nothing at all to do with the fact that Volvo is a Chinese-owned company and China has a severe overcapacity for battery-production.
Meanwhile in France, the Government of President Jupiter has decreed that all gasoline and diesel powered vehicles will be banned entirely by 2040. Which means that French families driving to the public square to watch infidel beheadings and gay people tossed from rooftops will have to drive there in electric cars. Germany, India, the Netherlands, and Norway have also set up time-tables to abolish internal combustion engines. This is all part of the left’s plan to starve Earth’s plant life of its vitally needed CO2 supply.
Don’t bother trying to explain to fascists that electric vehicles are an absolute catastrophe for the environment. It’s not really about the environment, it’s about signaling to other environmental fascists how much they care about the environment.
It’s not really about the environment, it’s about using the power of the government to force people to do things they don’t want to do.
Hawaii also wants to phase out fossil fuel vehicles by some year in the future, I think 2025 or 2040.
My question is what do the poor people do? They can’t afford new cars in the first place, and certainly can’t afford the more expensive hybrid or electric cars. Heck, I wouldn’t even buy a hybrid as the break even point (the amount of gas saved to equal the premium paid for the car) is too far out, and possibly beyond what I’ll drive.
Emperors & children love to raise their arms & proclaim that something will happen & be in effect for all time. Often renaming months & days of the year, entire cities, entire nations; forgetting that they aren’t immortal & that their trusty lackeys are sneering in private.
The biggest problem, & there are many, with these people is that they just can’t accept that there is no viable perfectly clean energy source available to humanity. Reducing & shifting may work with a budget on the way to lowering costs, but it doesn’t work with energy production. The math is absolute. Somewhere or another, someone’s making dirt & farting at the sky.
That said, it’s Europe. It’s not America. We moved on from generally using public transport long ago, favoring personal transportation (the car). To the French, it’s not a crisis to start screaming about automobiles. But there is an absolute demographic that favors personal transportation & Macron is, already by proclamation, making it more expensive, & the plan would isolate people in their cities & countrysides. Not a good formula & not something people will obey.
But the French, are the French. Trading the lunacies of the Sun King’s world for modern stupidities. They’re generally irrational & – they’re the French. It’s what they do.
Macron consolidating his power melodramatically is just a pecking order thing. They think they’re the center of the universe, because they’re French. Even Merkel gets it. Macron seems to be everyone favorite son right now. Except US Democrats & Commies. Who are now confused at his actions in general. Unable to understand what he is. I don’t understand what he is either, but have at least not tried to stick a name tag on him. Yet. It’s France.
“Le Français prend l’ombre pour la proie, le mot pour la chose, l’apparence pour la réalité, et la formule abstraite pour le vrai. Il ne sort pas des assignats intellectuels…
La soif du vrai n’est pas une passion française. En tout le paraître est plus goûté que l’être, les dehors que le dedans, l’opinion que la conscience.
Ce jugement est dur.
L’erreur fondamentale de la France est dans sa psychologie. Elle a toujours cru qu’une chose dite était une chose faite… La France procède à coups d’éloquence, de canon ou de décrets : elle s’imagine ainsi changer la nature des choses; elle ne fait que des phrases et des ruines…
Elle ne veut pas voir que son impuissance à organiser la liberté vient de sa nature même, des notions qu’elle a de l’individu, de la société, de la religion, du droit, du devoir.
Sa façon est de planter les arbres par la tète et elle s’étonne du résultat.”
…
“Le French mistakes the shadow for the prey, the word for the thing, appearance for reality, and the abstract formula for the truth. He cannot escape the intellectual assignments…
Thirst for truth is not a french passion. In everything the appearance is more tasteful than the being, the outside more than the inside, the opinion more than the conscience.
This is a harsh assessment.
The fundamental error of France is in her psychology. She has always believed that a thing said is a thing done. France proceeds with strikes of eloquence, slogans, or decrees : she thus imagines she changes the nature of things; she produces nothing but sentences and ruins…
She refuses to see that her incapacity in organizing liberty comes from her very nature, from that very conception she holds about the individual, the society, the religion, justice, and duty.
Her way is to plant trees upside down and she is surprised about the results.”
— La revue Chretienne (The Christian Review, 1859)
“Her way is to plant trees upside down and she is surprised about the results.”
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Don’t ever think to become like France, America.
Not only this is absolutely not needed, but already too many others have literally ruined themselves trying it, by now.
It’s important to understand France & then forgive them, IMHO. Cyril understands.
@6 I’m just romantically selfish about the country, culture I happened to be born in.
My secret hope has long been that America eventually helps us to save us from ourselves.
I say, “has long been”, because I don’t keep it as a secret anymore.
God only knows if it will ever happen.
(And when I look at this recent Macron pick by we French, I’m pretty sad, euphemism, to see we really haven’t done much progress, if at all, since 1789, despite rare and short pauses for more sanity. Really depressing.)
And in other, under other latitudes — speaking of the French legacy — straight from our 1789 revolutionaries’ playbook, while already running the state :
The second to last stage = start telling the truth, not even hiding your intent any longer, before going for action — blood spill of anyone unwilling to continue the state-run “people’s revolution” :
https://www.noticiasaldiayalahora.co/nacionales/adan-chavez-ratifico-amenaza-opositores-tenemos-tomar-las-armas-lo-haremos-video
Adán Chavez Ratified Threat To Opponents: If We Have To Take Up Arms, We Will Do It
Venezuela, July 9
The candidate for the National Constituent Assembly, Adán Chávez, warned Sunday that the ruling party is prepared to defend the revolution, even with arms.
During an act in the state of Barinas for the beginning of the electoral campaign for the constituent, he said: “If we have to take up arms we will take the arms of the Republic to defend the legacy of Chávez, to defend Nicolás Maduro.”
…
The state to defend “the people’s revolution” at any and all costs.
Q.E.D.
Indeed, as the old saying reads, “who would want to change a winning team”?
Venezuela is doing so great with her current one, is she not?
Actually, I thing the French have the best chance of pulling off this stupidity because most of their electric comes from nukes. That is probably the only power source dense and green enough to propel all those electric vehicles. That doesn’t make the vehicles themselves much greener, but hey, why split hairs when you can split atoms?
Btw, more on topic:
You may not even know how hard you hit the nail on the head, sometimes. Or else, you must have lived in France, I’d have to assume.
Indeed, government owned and managed public transportation has worked so great for cities like Paris that our unionized and heavily government-regulated taxi cab
mafiashave had no other option than to invoke the greater magic of the E.U. supermen at casting out of the market alternative solutions which, strangely enough, were starting to catch like wild fires in the plebe’s (self interested) curiosity:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/07/04/blow-uber-top-eu-lawyer-says-french-ban-not-illegal/
Oh, on that one it’s easy — when it comes to our rulers (only) and their appealing to Ancient monikers like “Jupiter” — you can just take their words literally — then, they really mean it, because they actually believe it, especially since 1789 and Robespierre’s “Supreme Being”.
Econ 101, however, has ceased to be of any interest to them whatsoever, though, ever since circa the same period (despite Bastiat’s brave efforts to turn the tide in 1850).
Ever since, indeed, grandiose blueprints made-in-the-state are always good enough. You may have just started to get a lil bit of the taste of it with Obamacare, and another $10 trillion additional debt, so I heard.
No, never lived in France but I never comment on something I know nothing of & I have always had a gift of extrapolation akin to Hannibal Lecter & a mind like a trap which grabs info when available & since we hear something of France every. single. day. year & decade it’s easy to know what they’re doing, if not why. The why comes to me from being enamored of history as if it’s yesterday & fortunately I’ve just come off a binge of a few biographies of Louis xiv, the Bourbons, his women & life in 17th Cen France, plus the old social structure of their “ancient regime” & taxation. I’m also a student of human nature, an ability that was necessary to perfect since I was a terrible judge of character in my early years.
Thank you for the info, Cyril & thanks to V for the post.
I will say one thing further, since Cyril mentioned batteries from China. It’s been a very large frustration for several industries; these batteries. They’re not perfect & they suck. There will need to be advances in the technology & an additional segment of infrastructure created to handle of those that disposed. It’s a fine Joan D’Arc fist to the sky to say they’re changing from gasoline, but facts & problems get in the way of “good ideas”. I understand Macron wants to make a mark & these things are more important than they seem at first cuz they’re a legacy thing.
People who advise, tell their puppets to think big. Then bad things happen.
#11
Didn’t you see? The French ALSO want to switch off of nukes onto renewables. At the same time.
Hi V the K,
Read your link about electric cars being an environmental disaster.
“After it rains they plough, unstoppable, through roads flooded with water turned black by coal dust. They line up by the sides of the road, queuing to turn into one of Baotou’s many coal-burning power stations that sit unsettlingly close to freshly built apartment towers. Everywhere you look, between the half-completed tower blocks and hastily thrown up multi-storey parking lots, is a forest of flame-tipped refinery towers and endless electricity pylons. The air is filled with a constant, ambient, smell of sulphur. It’s the kind of industrial landscape that America and Europe has largely forgotten – at one time parts of Detroit or Sheffield must have looked and smelled like this.”
Coal is an environmental disaster as well, right?
@15
Well, Detroit used to look like this:
http://imgur.com/a/Caobt
Now, it looks like this:
http://imgur.com/a/R00LR
Somehow, I find myself not exactly 100% confident that Detroit’s transformational endeavor can be entirely (if at all) explained by whether, or not, the city ever happened to consider coal mining, or auto manufacturing, or vanguard art display on sidewalks, or pokemon mass production (granted, the city may have not tried the latter), or etc, as a source of revenue.
Little pinky says the transformation had nothing to do with the actual or potential happenstance of any such economic activities.
I suppose we have to make some sort of other guess as to why, exactly, it happened, then…
@16:
Just my wild guess:
constantly questionable direction (or would that be, “questionably constant direction”?) of the city management over a
long enoughperiod of time.But heck, that’s just a wild guess.
A tu quoque and a straw man combined. I’m not even mad, just impressed.