California ZEV goals

I’d like to share the vivid concluding comments by California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols for item 14-8-5 at their meeting last week in Diamond Bar (Los Angeles), re-articulating California’s zero-emissions vehicle goals, and politely but specifically disagreeing with board member Dan Sperling’s promotion of a more gradual approach. It begins at about 6:05:50 on the video archive.

I fundamentally disagree with my colleague Dan Sperling about how we’re going to get to where we want to go. … I think we should be driven … by a desire to solve a problem, which is the unacceptable amount of air pollution and greenhouse emissions that are coming from our transportation sector.

… the ZEV mandate is fundamentally a simple goal, it is a vision of where we’re trying to get to … by 2030, 100% of the vehicles sold in California had better be essentially zero-emission vehicles, looked at on a life-cycle basis, and by the time we get to 2050 we’ve got to change the whole fleet. Now there’s things we can do to get more people to use transit, have bike-able walkable communities, …”

Above is a photo of their outside display of one of about every ZEV currently made – BEV and FCV automobiles, BEV and FCV buses, a BEV UPS delivery van, and two heavy truck cabs.

You can also see my testimony on this item at about 4:57:00.