Via the regulatory Deep State, Biden is progressively banning the automobile, which has long been a symbol of American freedom and industry. As part of his overall war on transportation, he is doing the same to the trucks that transport food and other goods:

The Biden administration finalized long-awaited regulations targeting emissions generated from heavy-duty vehicles, including trucks and buses, the latest salvo in President Biden’s sweeping climate agenda.

Climate agenda. As if these power-mad insects controlled the planet itself.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced the new regulations Friday morning, and officials said they represent the strongest-ever greenhouse gas emissions standards of their kind.

Regulations that might engender resistance are announced on Fridays, to make it easier for the complicit media to bury them. They are then inflicted progressively, so the frog doesn’t jump out of the pot:

The rules will kick in beginning in 2026 for model year 2027 vehicles and progressively become more stringent through model year 2032, forcing a larger number of trucks and buses to be zero-emissions in that time frame.

The measurable effect on the supposedly problematic weather will be absolutely nil, as even Biden probably knows. But there will be plenty effect on the price of most everything we buy. Visit Biden-Mart to see the effect his policies have already had at the grocery store.

On tips from Chuck A and Ed McAninch.

Three fundamental rights that progressives must abolish before they can inflict absolute tyranny are free speech (or as they call it, “misinformation”), gun ownership, and independent transportation. The Biden Regime has moved decisively on the latter:

The Biden administration finalized its crackdown on gas cars Wednesday, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing drastic climate regulations meant to ensure more than two-thirds of passenger cars and light trucks sold by 2032 are electric or hybrid vehicles.

Electric cars are unaffordable, unreliable, inefficient, and dangerous, in addition to being harmful to the environment. People don’t want them, so the government subsidizes them lavishly with our money. People still don’t want them. So Biden et al. are making them mandatory.

For the privilege of driving inferior vehicles, Americans will pay through the nose:

The five-year cost to own an average electric vehicle is more than $92,000, according to the North American Auto Dealers Association.

Compare that to a typical gas-powered vehicle, which over the same period costs $76,500.

That is among the many good reasons people do not want EVs.

In December, Ford announced it was cutting planned production of its F-150 Lightning pickup in half due to “changing market demand.”

Ford loses $60,000 for every electric moonbatmobile sold.

The end goal of imposing inferior and unaffordable EVs is to deprive us of cars altogether.

If we let them take cars away from us, there is not much hope we will defend free speech or guns.

On tips from Varla, R F, and Mr. Freemarket.

Whatever people want, capitalism will provide — including opportunities for enviromoonbat virtue signaling. This is done through green-washing:

If you want to make the ultimate environmentally-friendly statement, you have to order an electric car with a vegan leather interior.

“Vegan leather” used to be known as vinyl or pleather.

One righteous moonbat is not fooled:

My annoyance stems from the sheer amount of greenwashing used to punt fake leather, now sold as an optional extra or the eco-friendly alternative. …

[J]ust because it’s vegan-friendly doesn’t mean it’s environmentally friendly. …

Basically, manufacturers are still using materials derived from good old-fashioned petroleum plastic.

Petroleum plastic — the greatest advance in materials science since bronze — is regarded as unclean in the moonbat religion.

Because cows will be killed anyway so we can eat them,

By opting for leather, you’re actually reducing global waste…

There is also this to consider:

I’m willing to bet a large percentage of people with eco-friendly interiors drive around in leather shoes.

That’s why everyone who truly believes in woke ideology goes barefoot.

Don’t be duped, moonbats! It is bad enough for the environment to foolishly buy an EV, let alone one with faux leather interior.

On a tip from Mike B.

Winter is a powerful argument against electric vehicles. Even if you are able to get a pricey moonbatmobile to charge in the cold, there are other people to think of. Charging EVs unnecessarily strains an already vulnerable power grid. A countermoonbat in Yukon can attest to the likely consequences:

Meanwhile, liberal authorities exert increasing pressure to force more people into EVs, increasing both the stress and the reliance on the power grid, even while they restrict energy production in the name of their atavistic weather gods. Green blackouts already loom.

Good thing the guy in the video has a generator. Democrats oppose them.

At the risk of stating the obvious, our moonbat rulers do not mean us well. They are engineering an energy crisis.

On a tip from Jack S.

The sole point of heavily subsidized yet still pricey electric cars is that, according to liberal ideology, driving them results in cooler weather. Good thing for Tesla owners that this is nonsense, or their vehicles might never work at all. In suburban Chicago, public charging stations have become EV graveyards:

“Nothing. No juice. Still on zero percent,” said Tyler Beard, who has been trying to recharge his Tesla at an Oak Brook Tesla supercharging station since Sunday afternoon. “And this is like three hours being out here after being out here three hours yesterday.”

Beard was among the dozens of Tesla owners trying desperately to power up their cars at the Tesla supercharging station in Oak Brook. It was a scene mirrored with long lines and abandoned cars at scores of other charging stations around the Chicago area.

Charging stations aren’t the only place to find dead electric cars when the weather turns cold.

Kevin Sumrak, who landed at O’Hare on Sunday night to find his Tesla dead.

Sumlak was forced to hire a flatbed tow truck to try to find a working charging station.

Even if he finds one, getting the car to take the charge in the cold is another matter. But the story will have a happy ending, so long as he learns his lesson and sticks to real cars in the future — unless Democrats make dysfunctional EVs mandatory, as is already the plan in California and New York.

On tips from Wiggins and Chris Neilson.

The reason economic freedom results in a dramatically higher standard of living than command and control economics is that it allows resources to be allocated in the way that naturally makes sense, the way water naturally finds its own level. Hertz demonstrates what the free market thinks of the electric vehicles leftists want to impose:

Rental car giant Hertz on Thursday said it will sell about 20,000 electric vehicles from its U.S. fleet. …

The rental car giant said it would allocate funds it gets from selling the vehicles toward purchasing more internal combustion engine vehicles “to meet customer demand.”

Unsurprisingly, customers prefer reliable vehicles that are easy to keep running to virtue-signaling moonbatmobiles that only a drooling cretin could believe will have any impact on the supposedly problematic weather.

Hertz’s stated goal is to “reduce damage expense associated with EVs.” To reduce damage expense to US taxpayers resulting from their money being thrown at electric vehicles, Democrats need to be pried from power — preferably before EVs are made mandatory.

On tips from CZwonderpig and Eddie_Valiant.

Finally, some good news where electric vehicles are concerned. These batteries were out to sea when they burst into flames, rather than in cars in sleeping family’s garages:

A cargo ship carrying burning lithium-ion batteries remained anchored off the coast of Unalaska Saturday, as marine firefighting experts continued responding to the situation.

The 410-foot Genius Star XI reported the fire to the Coast Guard early Thursday morning while traveling to San Diego, and was directed to Dutch Harbor, where it arrived Friday.

The ship remains two miles offshore, and a one-mile safety zone around the vessel is being enforced.

You can see why Chevrolet has warned customers to park their EVs 50 feet away from the nearest vehicle.

Lithium-ion batteries pose particular dangers because they are hard to extinguish, emit toxic fumes and carry the risk of exploding.

Fortunately for the atavistic weather gods worshiped by our moonbat rulers, our safety is not a concern, so the campaign to force us into unsafe, unreliable, and economically insane EVs can continue.

The weather gods will understand about the smoke coming off the burning ship. They know that the important thing with liberals is intentions, not results.

On tips from Dr. Kufi Tutite and Steve T.

They tried electric buses in Connecticut. Because of their tendency to burst into flames, the entire fleet was pulled from service. They tried them in Wyoming. At last word, none works. Edmonton blew a fortune on 60 electric buses. Most of those don’t work either. Turns out electric vehicles don’t make sense in the cold. Naturally the next step was to try them in frigid Minnesota:

In 2015, Duluth received a $6.3 million federal grant for six, ultimately seven, battery-electric buses from Proterra.

Proterra has gone bankrupt, leaving customers trying to keep their vehicles running in the lurch.

In Minneapolis,

Metro Transit followed in 2017 when it received a $1.7 million federal grant to buy eight battery-electric accordion buses…

They got free money and saved the allegedly imperiled climate from harmless carbon emissions. Everyone lived happily ever after — until reality set in:

Both the Twin Cities and Duluth have had problems with their battery-electric buses. For one, they can’t go as far as their builders advertised, in part because of the cold weather.

Too bad the global warming hoax isn’t real. If temperatures would rise by more than the current insignificant fluctuations, EVs would be less insane.

Metro Transit’s battery-electric buses are also less reliable than their diesel-fueled counterparts. A September 2023 presentation to the Met Council’s Transportation Committee showed the battery-electric buses broke down twice as often.

The outlandishly expensive batteries frequently fail, as do the chargers.

Duluth also had problems with its battery-electric bus fleet. Between April 2019 and February 2020, the fleet averaged 7,717 miles between breakdowns, four times as often compared to their diesel counterparts. … The buses struggled to make it up the city’s storied steep hills and to keep riders warm in the winter.

The federal government continues to throw our money at the quixotic cause of electrifying buses in frozen Minnesota:

In August, the Federal Transit Administration awarded Metro Transit a $17.5 million grant to buy 12 battery-electric buses…

Since Duluth and Metro Transit rode the electric wave, other agencies joined in on the current. With $5.4 million from two federal grants, Rochester placed into service four battery-electric buses of the exact same make and model as Metro Transit’s…

Another federal grant for electric buses in Minnesota will cost us $8.1 million.

It’s almost as if our rulers couldn’t care less how hard we have to work to create the wealth they waste.

On tips from ABC of the ANC and Skip.

Sometimes storms have silver linings:

A top Maine state environmental agency delayed a highly-anticipated vote to approve a sweeping electric vehicle (EV) mandate amid a storm that caused widespread power outages.

The Maine Board of Environmental Protection…

…voted in late October to approve the Advanced Clear Car Program, which would mimic regulations in California mandating that more than 40% of new car purchases in the state be electric by 2027 and 82% be electric by 2032. The agency was expected to finalize that mandate during the meeting on Thursday.

After they have the lights back on, leftist tyrants like Democrat Governor Janet Mills will go right back to making transportation dependent on the increasingly undependable power grid — speaking of which:

Natural gas power generation has become increasingly crucial as more unreliable wind and solar have been added to U.S. power grids. Yet, the EPA seems even more determined to destabilize U.S. power grids by imposing severe restrictions on U.S. natural gas production through methane reduction rules that could shut down a significant portion of U.S. natural gas production.

At the same time, the EPA is also coming after coal with regulations intended to prevent its use.

Coal retirements are increasing the prospect of an electric reliability crisis. Already, utilities have announced plans to retire some 81,000 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired generation (almost half the existing coal fleet) within the next six years.

The two-pronged attack will have a devastating attack on our electricity supply.

Alarm bells that U.S. power grids have become increasingly destabilized have been sounding for years. [The North American Electric Reliability Corporation] has repeatedly stated that U.S. grid instability has already reached dangerous levels. Yet, EPA has ignored the warnings and continued to march forward with rules that will cause U.S. power grids to fail.

Back in Maine, Rep Jared Golden observes the obvious:

“Forcing Mainers to purchase cars and trucks powered by electricity when our grid is insufficient, charging stations are few and far between, and a storm like yesterday’s would render 80% of cars useless is, to say the least, ill-advised.”

Unless the objective is to immobilize the population.

Mobility is freedom. The Soviet Union used internal passports to prevent it. Democrats use the global warming hoax.

On tips from Chuck A, R F, and ABC of the ANC.

Democrats have spent $billions upon $billions of our money in the name of getting us to drive dangerous, expensive, inefficient, unreliable, and environmentally harmful electric cars, for reasons they have not divulged but that probably don’t have anything to do with the allegedly problematic climate, which will remain unaffected. What are we getting for the money? Nothing:

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations across the country. Under the program, states can qualify for as much as 80 percent of the cost to build chargers and bring them online. But as Politico reported this week, not a single charger funded by the program is yet operational.

Nonetheless,

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that by 2030, half of all vehicles sold in the U.S. must be electric.

In other words, EPA bureaucrats have mandated that we will be going without cars, in accordance with the totalitarian power evidently bestowed upon them by the US Constitution. There will be nowhere near enough chargers to support them.

“The slow rollout…primarily boils down to the difficulties state agencies and charging companies face in meeting a complex set of contracting requirements and minimum operating standards for the federally-funded chargers, according to interviews with state and EV industry officials,” the article notes.

Too bad vehicles can’t run on red tape. Then our moonbat rulers could offer a viable alternative to normal cars.

No worries. Biden’s bureauweenies can just issue another decree dictating that we must drive electric vehicles whether there are charging stations or not.

On a tip from Lyle.

You can subsidize EVs to the hilt with other people’s money. You can replace bus fleets with them, leaving people to walk through the snow. You can use your control of the media to shriek that life on earth will perish if people don’t embrace them. But so long as safer, more reliable, and more financially sensible real cars are available, you can’t make people buy the absurd contraptions — as 3,900 car dealers suggest in a letter to Biden:

Dealers have a 103-day supply of EVs compared to 56 days for all cars. It takes them on average 65 days to sell an EV, about twice as long as for gas-powered cars. EV sales are slowing though manufacturers have slashed prices and increased discounts. Consumers paid on average $50,683 for an EV in September, compared to $65,000 a year ago.

Prices will rocket upward when they no longer have to compete with real cars.

Among the numberless reasons not to buy an EV,

“Customers are also concerned about the loss of driving range in cold or hot weather,” the auto dealers say. “Some have long daily commutes and don’t have the extra time to charge the battery. Truck buyers are especially put off by the dramatic loss of range when towing.”

The dealers want the Administration to “tap the brakes” on its proposed tailpipe emissions rules that would effectively mandate that EVs comprise two-thirds of car sales by 2032. Auto makers might meet the government’s quotas in leftwing cities where Teslas are a political fashion statement, but price and convenience matter more elsewhere.

Our rulers represent the populations of cities rotted through with liberalism like New York and Los Angeles. They regard the rest of us as “deplorable” and “threats to Our Democracy.”

The dealers’ letter is an important political signal that progressive climate coercion isn’t as popular as Democrats think. Americans don’t like to be told what to do or what they must buy.

Why would Democrats care what we think? They have the media to tell us what to think.

Before progressives can achieve absolute tyranny, we must be denied independent transportation. Electric vehicles, which regular people can afford only so long as they are subsidized, which rely on a power supply that is being choked off in the name of the global warming hoax, and which can easily be remotely disabled en masse, are a bridge to this objective. If Democrats remain in power much longer, they will achieve it.

On tips from Varla, Jack D, and ABC of the ANC.

The electric vehicles that leftists subsidize to the hilt with our money and that they intend to force us to drive continue to make no sense.

Exhibit A:

Automaker Stellantis on Wednesday announced a recall of more than 32,000 of its hybrid Jeep Wrangler SUVs because they pose a potential fire risk.

As part of what the company described as a routine review of customer information, Stellantis determined that eight of the hybrid Wranglers had caught fire while they were turned off and parked.

Those foolish enough to have purchased these vehicles rather than real cars are advised by Stellantis not to park them near buildings, because they might burst into flames at any time.

For Exhibit B, David Blackmon guffaws over an Edmonton Journal article entitled, “More than half of Edmonton’s $60-million electric bus fleet not roadworthy.”

The Canadian city purchased 60 electric buses for $1 million each (double the cost of reliable diesel buses) from the green boondoggle Proterra, which has gone Chapter 11, making it difficult to keep the buses running in Edmonton as in Jackson, Wyoming, where the entire fleet does not work.

From the story:

It takes a diesel-powered on-board heater to keep the body of the bus warm. And despite $200,000 in special blankets to keep all those batteries toasty, the Proterra buses are still feeling that northern Alberta chill in their skimpy range.

That’s $3,333 per bus to keep the batteries warm. But still the buses don’t work.

That’s okay; soon electric moonbatmobiles will be mandatory. They will work because bureaucrats will command that they have to work.

On tips from ABC of the ANC and R F.

Among the countless reasons not to knuckle under to moonbats and buy an electric car is the cost of replacing the battery:

Simrat Sooch of Stoney Creek, Ont., was a true believer in electric vehicles.

He was disabused of his illusions after he bought a Hyundai Ioniq. The overpriced toy stopped charging, so he took it to the dealership, where he learned the battery needed to be replaced.

The quoted cost, including the battery, installation and taxes came to more than $50,000.

This is $50,000 Canadian, but still.

The warranty had just run out. Since the cost of repair exceeded the value of the car, he scrapped it. Total loss, like all of our money Biden has been shoveling at EV charging stations and subsidies. Unless Democrats succeed at making them mandatory, no one is going to be driving an electric car once even liberals realize how foolish they are.

On a tip from Steve T.

A coercion-based economy run by corruptocrats and deranged ideologues makes possible marvels of lunacy and waste. In a free country, few if any electric vehicles would be produced, since they are not worth the money it takes to manufacture them. In contrast, in the USSA,

Lucid, the California-based electric vehicle company that makes the Air Sedan, lost over $430,000 for every car it sold in the third quarter of this year, according to the firm’s latest financial report.

Last quarter was even worse. Lucid lost $544,000 for every vehicle sold in Q2.

Ford only loses $60,000 for every ideologically correct electric moonbatmobile sold. But give the federal government time to finish absorbing Detroit and no doubt in will manage to compete with Lucid.

You can see why Democrats are giving up on extravagant subsidies and have introduced straightforward bans on real cars.

On a tip from R F.