i’ll wager, from an armchair mind you, that this is because decrepeit Scrooges see it as a plus that the people from the regions most affected as “lesser people”, while also holding on to money and ensuring states militarize to defend that money from increasingly pissed of people.
so TLDR ig racist old dudes appreciating what fascism does for 'em.
this is just an armchair assessment fron me though. why is fossil fuel still being used?
Switching to something new usually inherently costs money. (Capital expense) If you are scraping by, you can’t afford another $500-$1000 a month car payment for a new car.
The option to convert an older already paid for internal combustion vehicle basically requires another $10k minimum, not including any regulatory stuff and that would be parts cost alone, no labor. Add to that regulatory/local registration issues with the diy route and you basically bake continued demand for fossil fuels into the system.
You can mitigate some of that by doing public transportation but you have to have a functional system AND an public that wants to use it.
This basically means that a large portion of the population who won’t/can’t buy new EVs. Is stuck using gas vehicles until you get lower cost used EVs. The problem there is that they are expensive to repair and NOT diy friendly. Add to that battery deg and lower reliability (in general see used teslas) and people are scared to buy used EVs.
Its a pricing problem that we have not gotten around yet. The subsidies helped but weren’t enough to get more people in. Couple that with a bad economic situation where people are holding onto their older stuff for longer and you basically get only progress on the higher income side while lower income brackets have to still use their gas vehicles which means the producers keep producing and supplying to a captive market.
It should be noted that the US government is the reason EVs in the US are so expensive.
Why would you say that is? Not doubting you on that but it mostly seems like they are market priced as premium products. I.E. a Rivian is priced basically like a normal mid to high end suv. A base level model 3 is in line with a mid level camry iirc.
Because the government enacted tariffs on foreign made EVs that would have cost $10-20k in order to keep domestic prices high so the US auto industry can keep making record profits.
My understanding is that they either don’t meet us safety regulations both for crash testing and ev systems safety or they have not gone through the relevant regulatory steps to get those certificationa. The tarrifs certainly come into play as well though.
Because Standard Oil, Firestone and General Motors lobbied against public transportation, in the USA, so they could sell more cars.
Yeah, I was mostly addressing the immediate reason. The historical ones are way more complex as you mentioned. Now, you have to overcome suburban sprawl and hostile urban development where everything is spread out, requiring a car to use as a direct result of our past shitty choices/lobbying efforts.
A little bit of the defense budget and the will to do it will get it done!
Eta: and create a jobs program. If we add renewables and green spaces, it may rival the New Deal jobs program!