No one appears to have noticed this yet. But they will.
Not on the road – or at the car dealership.
At the supermarket.
For openers.
Uncle is “proposing” a “program” (the soft-sell language hides the reality of regulations issued by an unelected bureaucracy – EPA – which will be extremely mandatory) in order to “Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Improve Fuel Efficiency (their exact language, in the EPA’s pretentious Federal All Caps Style) of “Medium, and Heavy Duty Vehicles.”
See here.
Translation – sans the All Caps pretentiousness – commercial vehicles such as big rigs that pull freight, cement trucks, flatbeds/rollbacks, busses, 2500 and 3500 series work trucks and so on will have both fuel economy mandatory minimums imposed on them and be subjected to new “emissions” regulations that are based on the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
Because “climate change.”
This will be der untergang of whatever’s left of the already eviscerated economy. I’ll explain.
Until now, vehicles over a certain gross weight – 2500 series and larger – were exempted from federal Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) mandatory minimums (currently set at 35.5 MPG on average for passenger cars) on the basis of the fact that heavy duty trucks are heavy and must be so in order to be fit for any sort of duty.
Which means bigger engines, more fuel used. You can have the heavy-duty capability or you can have high fuel economy.
You cannot have both in the same package.
If you need a vehicle capable of pulling say a 15,000-pound trailer, a turbo four cylinder in a unibody chassis connected to a CVT transmission isn’t going to cut it.
For serious work, you need beefy steel frames – and big V8s and diesels. But expecting them to be fuel-sippy is like expecting a 300 pound NFL lineman to subsist on a 2,000 calorie per day diet and still be capable of functioning as an NFL lineman.
But this is precisely what Uncle expects.
Or rather, is going to demand – at gunpoint.
Remember, this is not a “program.” It is a regulatory fatwa – with the weight of Uncle behind it.
And it will not be Uncle who pays the freight (literally).
It will be us – as always.
We – who had no opportunity to vote for (much less against) any of this.
EPA – a federal bureaucracy peopled by unelected apparatchiks who have never received anyone’s consent to be governed – simply decided that the time has come for “…a strong and comprehensive heavy-duty national program (there’s that word again) designed to address the urgent and closely intertwined challenges of dependence on oil, energy security and global climate change.” (Italics added.)
Really?
Why is how much fuel we buy and burn – with our money – their business? And “Global climate change”?
Who says?
Why they do! Fuhrer befehl, wir folgen!
The arrogance is luminous.
We are looking at a Mike Tyson in his prime one-two punch here. It’s not merely that they will be imposing fuel efficiency regs on heavy trucks – an engineering oxymoron akin to our NFL lineman on a 2,000 calorie a day diet – but also that they will be imposing an “emissions” mandate that cannot be complied with by mechanical/catalytic means.
This is critical to understand.
The EPA knows most people – who know nil about chemistry or physics – will not understand. They will only hear about “global climate change,” which they’ve (mostly) bought into – not knowing just how much they have bought into.
