Publication: Climate One Podcast
The COVID-19 recession has happened faster and hit deeper than most people could have imagined. Perhaps not surprisingly, the people most at risk in a shuttered economy are often the same people who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Assemblymember Phil Ting is among the guests for this episode.
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California state assemblyman member Phil Ting introduced a bill that would allow only zero emission passenger vehicles to be registered in the state starting in 2040. That bill didn’t go very far and Ting pulled it when opposition arose from some surprising places.
Phil Ting: The basic idea is if you want clean air you need clean cars. And we’ve seen what would happen if we actually move to clean cars today. Without having millions of cars on the road every day we see for the first time in a long time L.A. has got three weeks running of clean air. The Bay Area air quality is significantly better. We know what the solution is we just haven't had the will or frankly some of the technology that's needed. I believe we need to set a deadline for any assignment. If you have an assignment without a deadline it never gets done. And so without having a deadline for when we need to transition to new clean cars completely. It's very difficult to signal to the industry how far along they should be how many cars should be selling. I voted for having that deadline by 2040 I’d hope that it would get further than it did. I thought that with so many other countries already moving this direction that us following other countries seem to be common sense. England, France, India, Norway have already moved to that deadline or even more aggressively. I was surprised about a few environmental groups as well as electric vehicle groups did not embrace this notion of setting a deadline. Trump had gotten elected most environmental groups were very afraid of the rollbacks that have now occurred. They are worried about how California moving in a certain direction was gonna hinder some of their work to hold the Obama gains together which have now been lost. Since then we’ve taken certain immediate steps. I had a bill last year AB 40 that also got held up. But we were able to put the point of the bill into the budget, which was to actually study how we get to clean cars by 2040. How many charging stations do we need how many different types of cars do we need. If someone wants to buy truck and there’s no clean option, they’ll still gonna go buy a truck. As you and I know the most profitable cars continue to be the biggest gas guzzlers whether it’s trucks, minivans SUVs are the ones with the worst gas mileage but with the highest profit margin. So really so many auto companies have been reticent to really move to clean cars.
Greg Dalton: That was California State Assemblymember Phil Ting.