By making “IC” cars impossible – legislatively – electric cars are to be made inevitable. In this way, the practical and functional deficits of EVs become irrelevances. Just as the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are irrelevant as a practical and functional matter.
The commonalities – the tactics – are interesting.
Naturally, they emanate from the same place.
In the case of the Fourth Amendment, the government simply decreed it had a “compelling interest” to override it at will, whenever it felt like doing so. The amendment’s crystal clear prohibition of any unreasonable search, absent probable cause wasn’t denied. It was simply swept away because it was in the way . . . of exactly the police state tactics those prohibitions were enshrined to forbid.
Similarly, there is now a “compelling interest” to force-feed electric and automated cars to the public, which hasn’t asked for them. The analog of the Fourth Amendment impediment is the free market, which exists to prevent exactly such force-feeding (and profiteering, which always attends the funnel in the mouth, with the gun pointed at the victim’s temple).
Thus, the free market must be suppressed. In its place, a command economy – Mussolini (or Goring) style. The edicts about what shall be manufactured are decreed; price signals become . . . irrelevant. It is probably only a matter of a handful of years before there is an official Five Year Plan – complete with pronouncements about the overfulfillment thereof.
Electric cars have to be force-fed because there are not enough takers on the merits. It’s a simple statement of fact; no elaboration needed. If this were not so, the force-feeding wouldn’t be necessary. No one puts a gun to people’s heads to buy Starbucks coffee or for that matter, Toyota Corollas – because it’s not necessary. They sell on the merits.
EVs don’t.
It is a bitter pill for their proselytizers – and profiteers – to swallow. In a moral universe, they’d go back to the drawing board, come up with something that could sell on the merits. But that has proved not possible thus far, which drives the proselytizers batty and fails to line the pockets of the profiteers (which includes but is by no means limited to Our Friend Elon).
Thus, the legislative and regulatory attempts to get rid of IC-engined cars. If you can’t build a better mousetrap, illegalize your competitions’ mousetrap.
They tried using emissions regs – but that failed because IC-engined cars got clean. Nearly “zero emissions” clean. That is, almost electric car clean. Very possibly, cleaner in the aggregate than electric cars – which haven’t got tailpipes but do have smokestacks. The government hasn’t – and never will – tally all the emissions produced by electric cars. Unless, of course, they become functionally and economically viable – at which point it will. But that is another story, saved for later.
And so, the government changed the rules. Better example, pulled away the football, Lucy-style, that Charlie Brown was just on the verge of kicking through the goalposts.
Carbon dioxide became a “pollutant.”
