This is a great pledge. Citizens are pledging to give up their fossil fueled vehicles. The government is going to stop using fossil fueled trucks and buses. They’re going to get rid of all their airports. No more fossil fueled boats will be allowed at the harbors….oh, wait
Mass. Is Going On A Greenhouse Gas Diet. So Should Every Other State In The Northeast
From hosting the first Thanksgiving to creating the country’s first public park, first public secondary school, and first university, Massachusetts has experience in setting the national pace. So it’s fitting that the Bay State is one of just three, plus Washington, D.C., making a New Year’s resolution to go on a greenhouse gas diet.
Inked also by Connecticut and Rhode Island shortly before 2020 expired, the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) sets a gradually tightening cap on signatories’ motor vehicle emissions. Fuel suppliers will bid at auction for pollution rights under the cap, with states putting the proceeds — totaling an estimated $3 billion over the next decade for the four early adopters — toward cleaner transportation, direct and indirect: mass transit, e-vehicle incentives, walking and bike trails, and commute-cutters like more broadband.
You know what this does? Make it a lot harder for lower income and lower middle class people to have reliable personal transportation. The “fuel suppliers” will just raise their cost of goods, passing it on to the consumer. It would be funny if they all said “nah, we’re out”. Same in those other states and D.C. Especially D.C., which wouldn’t be able to operate without fossil fuels. How would all the politicians and bureaucrats do their work without fossil fuels? All the visitors? International airports?
If a Beacon Hill bill committing to net-zero emissions from all sources by 2050 is signed into law, the state that saw the first shots in the Revolution will fire a policy fusillade against climate change.
Kinda strange mentioning the beginning of freedom and hatred of taxation in the same paragraph about a bill that removes freedom, liberty, and choice along with increasing taxation, eh?
The TCI, based on a similar Northeast compact controlling power plant emissions, won’t kick in for another two years, until 2023. Eight other Northeastern states are dawdling on the deal, their concerns ranging from surmountable to stupid — New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s “boondoggle†charge winning blue ribbon for the latter. (Has Sununu similarly described the $649 billion that taxpayers shovel at fossil fuel companies?)
See, it’s so damned important that they won’t bother starting for another two years.
If that’s so, we should be throwing everything we have at it. Yet the progressive governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, while endorsing the TCI “conceptually,†is pocketing his signing pen for now. “I’m conscious of the sticker shock,†he said, that could result from higher gas prices under the plan (an estimated five to nine cents a gallon).
Well, yes. Cleaner transportation requires making pollution, hence gasoline, more expensive, as a business consultant’s paper concedes (while opposing fuel taxes as burdensome for commerce). But there are better ways to cushion the hit on struggling families than frying the globe.
If crazy Phil Murphy is balking at how expensive this will be for citizens, should give pause for thought. They think it’s just 5-9 cents a gallon, but, it will be more, and that will effect most everything. But, how to cushion the blow?
The TCI calls for member states to spend on affordable mass transit, an undertaking for which they’ve been promised a partner in the incoming Biden administration. Rural areas lack mass transit because they lack masses, but Vermont is one place where environmental groups and the government are test-driving alternatives like clean electric buses. How about helping such initiatives by diverting some of those aforementioned fossil fuel subsidies?
Oh, so they’ll just drive you to using buses rather than your own personal vehicle. It takes me 15 minutes to get to work in my car. It would take almost an hour on the bus, which would also require me to walk a mile and a half to get to the stop. And switch multiple times. The big wigs who won’t give up their own fossil fueled vehicles have no problem forcing everyone else to give up theirs.
