Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a plan that would fast-track the elimination of nearly every gas-powered vehicle in the country.
The Senate’s top Democrat wants to spend a massive amount of money enticing Americans to exchange their gas-guzzling vehicles for an electric car.
Schumer’s proposal, which he announced in a New York Times editorial Thursday, shows Democrats are lurching leftward on the issue.
“That’s why I am announcing a new proposal designed to rapidly phase out gas-powered vehicles and replace them with zero-emission, or ‘clean,’ vehicles like electric cars,” Schumer wrote after suggesting scientists agree that climate change represents an imminent threat to the U.S.
He added: “The goal of the plan, which also aims to spur a transformation in American manufacturing, is that by 2040 all vehicles on the road should be clean.” The plan would remove more than 63 million gas-powered cars from the road by 2030, Schumer estimates.
Schumer’s office expects the proposal to cost roughly $392 billion over a decade. The Washington Post referred to the idea on Friday as “essentially ‘Cash for Clunkers’ on steroids,” referring to a policy from the Obama-era encouraging Americans to trade their old vehicles for fuel-efficient cars.
Cash for Clunkers was the mechanism allowing the federal government to offer incentives of between $2,500 and $4,500 to citizens who traded in their older vehicles for newer ones.
The policy received a lot of media play, but critics called the idea a failure even if it was designed with the best of intentions.
The senator also announced the plan on Twitter Friday.
Under Schumer’s plan, car owners will get a rebate starting at $3,000 if they trade in their car for an electric vehicle, with the amount of rebate going up the longer the vehicle goes without recharging. The rebate could dramatically exceed the existing $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles.
Citizens are not the only ones who’d get a windfall. States and cities would also receive $45 billion in funding to install charging stations.
The plan, which does not have legislative text, would also provide $17 billion to grant programs to build new factories for electric vehicles.
The senator’s idea comes as Democrats continue shifting leftward on environmental issues.
House Democrats introduced a Green New Deal in February calling for a “10-year national mobilization” toward a series of goals aimed at fighting global warming.
The deal’s proponents called for the eradication of fossil fuels before lawmakers stripped the idea out of the final product.
Conservative analysts are already criticizing Schumer’s plan.
“The money would be wasted. Even if Americans stopped driving entirely today and forever, there would be no discernible impact on, much less improvement of the weather or climate,” Steve Milloy, a lobbyist on behalf of the energy industry, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Read rest at Daily Caller
By now we should be asking ourselves why all electric cars and why convert all energy to electricity? How bad can it be?
Briefly,
Electric cars are not convenient: A typical electric car (60kWh battery) takes just under 8 hours to charge from empty-to-full with a 7kW charging point. Then you have to deal with limited range. Range is also adversely impacted by inclement weather, Traffic, rerouting, illness, change in plans… life happens.
Electric cars are not efficient: A minimum 10 to 12% of drawn electricity is lost during the conversion process from AC to DC charge. EVs convert about 59%–62% of the electrical energy from a charge to power at the wheels. Owning an EV necessarily requires access to a home, apartment, condo, townhome or public charging point. A couple hundred million charging points in Schumer’s world… if we middle incomer’s can afford an EV in Schummer’s world.
Electric cars are not cost effective. How do we know that? They are subsidized!
Electric cars are not environmentally friendly. Primary reason: It’s the batteries stupid.
There is a new marketing campaign, https://www.normalnow.com/, delivering the message that EVs are just like any other new technology – “they may have appeared weird and impractical at first, but once you get used to them, they’ll “seem” normal.”
SEEM, like.. give the impression or sensation of being something or having a particular quality….
SEEM, like.. charging an EV is like charging your smart phone.
SEEM, like.. cleaning a dirty room with air freshener.
Let’s plan an EV trip. Say you (in Herndon, VA) want to visit with grandma (in Boston, MA) this Thanksgiving. You own a Tesla Model S with the highest EV advertised range of 335 miles. Its 460 miles to grandma’s house. Normally an 8 hour drive in light traffic but this a well-traveled holiday. What to do? Take the tesla. In 6 to 7 hours you may make it to NYC before needing a full charge at a convenient charge point like https://www.plugshare.com/location/160930. Some 8 hours later you’re back on the road to grandma’s house. Ok. But what if life happens? You discover you have a wife and two children and they are expecting to go too… The trip gets a little more complicated since these additional passengers are people you presumably care about and the additional weight will reduce the tesla’s range. Safety, efficiency and convenience become more important considerations. What to do? Today you can opt to rent a gasoline powered car and show grandma pictures of your tesla on your smart phone. In Schummer’s all electric world you’re best option may be skyping your family visit with grandma…. If the sun is shining and gentle breezes are blowing.
But why convert all energy use to electric only???? Schumer and the progressive left tell us an all-electric powered world will actually reduce energy dependence of fossil fuels since Electricity will become our domestic energy source, safe from outside interference. Seems reasonable enough… if your blind and don’t stop to consider how Schumer and the progressive left really plan to make this electric only world work without destroying the country in the process.
Schumer and the progressive left’s proposed fundamental change is a huge shift to a totally different reality that will NOT be recoverable from and going in that direction would be accepting something outside the bounds of reason.
Make Schumer walk to everyplace he gose he tends to forget were not a Monarcy were a Republic
Using Gerry’s numbers of 272,480,000 registered vehicles in the US, and a very optimist cost $30,000 for each electric vehicle, the cost would be $8.17 trillion ($8,170,000,000,000). That is more than twice the national budget of $3.6 trillion. This doesn’t consider the high cost of replacing the batteries. The secret key to the plan is more of a plan to eliminate cars than to replace them. Rather than owning more than one car families would own at most one car and many wouldn’t own any. The extra time to use mass transit would dastically impact people’s lives. My daughter would be unemployed since her job is to drive to people’s homes and give music lessons and she doesn’t make enough to afford a $30,000 car. All of this would do nothing for emissions of the cars being used. The capacity will never exist to replace our current use of electricity with renewables unless nuclear power is used. The additional power for electric cars would have to be supplied by fossil fuel power plants.
Some cars for Schumer and his kind of loose nut The Flintstone car and the Gilligans Island car both are foot powered and made from natural material
Hey, and those aren’t OLD electric vehicles! There are a lot of 20 yr old gas vehicles being driven around, many of the poorly maintained because they belong to poor people. To compare the combustion rates of these old vehicles to shiny new electric cars is to just see the tip of the iceberg coming. And let me tell you something else those highly paid bureaucrats and politicians never noticed about the “Cash for Clunkers” program. It made it nearly impossible for poor people to buy used cars, for several years afterward. Do you have any idea of how poor you can get, if your old car dies and you can’t afford another old one ? You can lose your job, or you can get in debt to those check cashing scams or lose your apartment or, well you get the idea. NEVER EVER let the govt get hold of a “big idea” to make the world a better place! They thought it would be nice if more Americans owned their own homes, or got a college degree. How well did those programs work out?
In Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer world we would be better served if 98.5% of all cars were EV’s
There are any number of reasons why the idea of “all electric” is idiotic but I recently read an article about a man who burned to death in his tesla when it caught fire because rescuer’s couldn’t get him out… because the door handles retract when the car is in use.
So I have to ask “Are electric cars more likely to catch fire?”
“About 174,000 vehicle fires were reported in the United States in 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the National Fire Protection Association. … That works out to five fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to a rate of 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars.”
“The simple answer is probably not.”
No. No.
To do a fair comparison you also have to include the number of vehicles by type as well.
Let’s see… More than 350,000 new EVs will be sold in the U.S. in 2020. Those figures will give EVs a still tiny 2 percent share of the total U.S. fleet.
And how many registered motor vehicles are there in the U.S.? Some 272.48 million vehicles were registered here in 2017. The figures include passenger cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses, and other vehicles.
That works out to five fires for every billion miles traveled for EV’s which were less than 2% ( lets say 1.5% for this comparison.) of all vehicles of all types, compared to a rate of 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars which were 98.5 % of all vehicles of all types.
In 2017 there were 272,480,000 registered motor vehicles U.S.
1.5% or 4,087,200 are EV’s that averaged 5 fires for every billion miles traveled. Or 1 fire for every 817,440 EV’s on the road.
98.5% or 268,392,800 are gasoline cars that averaged 55 fires for every billion miles traveled. Or 1 fire for every 4,879,869 gasoline cars on the road.
“Are electric cars more likely to catch fire?” The simple answer is… OMG YES! 5.969696858485026 or 6 times more likely.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/17/news/companies/electric-car-fire-risk/index.html
It’s a stupid idea. Before Chucky went all in for the climate change hoax he used to support mass transit. Now it’s all about wealth transfer–our wealth transferred to the coffers of Big Government.
The Left is recklessly imposing unnecessary burdens on the underclasses. Schumer doesn’t worry about what car to buy. He’s a chauffeured fat cat. He has an expense account. He can not possibly think straight. His ego alone requires a half-ton to make two trips.
Last I heard, President Trump hasn’t cashed his pay checks.
I am not going to cooperate with this plan, in whatever way it might eventually be implemented. This is stupid. Even if it costs me money, I’m not switching just for the sake of playing the climate game.
Chuck Schumer’s face could be cut and pasted onto that old 70’s Nixon poster ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ You ain’t no Henry Ford. Stick to your knitting, Schumer.
OK, so how & where is all the copper, cobalt, lithium & other rare earth minerals going to be extracted to support millions of electric vehicles? How are you going to generate all the extra ELECTRICITY it will take to charge all those millions of EV’s? Wind & solar? You don’t have the resources or landmass available to possibly scale up enough renewables, let alone additional battery storage to support this ill advised transformation. Rather than relying on government buffoonery, I’d trust free markets to make sounder choices for consumers as we embark on the energy transition…
I couldn’t agree more. And, since the enviros have made it so difficult to mine the all important rare earths in the US, I’m sure the Chinese will be quite happy to supply all of our needs at a reazonable price. /snarc
Do not forget the Calif. plan to use the electric cars as energy storage whenever they are plugged in, so that they can drain your car when the grid needs energy. It is indeed a great way to force people to move from the country to the city.
This is exactly why the LIbtards in Calif. do not really care about the blackouts to prevent forest fires, as the majority of these people are Conservatives and they want to force them off the land eventually anyhow. Two great ways to force people to move. Cut off their power, destroy their transportation, isolating them. What a deal.
Not sure how that would work since I doubt that the car’s batter could provide current back nor the adapter could convert the DC back to AC for the grid.
Chucky Sleaze talk about stupid him and his fellow Democrats will have us in Ox Carts just how much more stupider can he get with this act? Someone needs to force him to walk where ever he gose and let him flap his arms to cross the Sea him and his fellow members of the Stupid Jackass Party