San Francisco Politician Wants to Outlaw Gas-Powered Cars

Electric CarSacramento is threatening to outlaw a freedom Californians have enjoyed for more than a century through a bill introduced by Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting, of San Francisco. If it’s passed and signed, new gasoline-powered cars will become the state’s new undocumented immigrants. Government will refuse to register them.

Should it become law, Assembly Bill 1745 would, beginning Jan. 1, 2040, “prohibit the department from accepting an application for original registration of a motor vehicle unless the vehicle is a zero-emissions vehicle.” Commercial vehicles weighing 10,001 pounds or more when fully loaded are exempt as are vehicles brought in from other states.


The latest research shows how the science continues to unfold. An academic study released just last week reported that the doomsday, worst-case scenario, the most extreme projection that global warming alarmists commonly cite, isn’t credible. The climate’s reaction to CO2 simply isn’t as intense as they claim. Lead researcher Peter Cox of Exeter University said both the low and high sensitivities had been all but ruled out.

The virtues of “zero-emissions” vehicles are overhyped, as well. There are few bona fide zero-emission vehicles in California or elsewhere. Their batteries aren’t charged by the dynamos of political rhetoric. Unless 100 percent of the state’s electric power is generated by sources that emit no greenhouse gases nor pollutants by 2040 — Sacramento’s goal is 2045 — a sizable portion of zero-emissions vehicles will be charged by electricity generated at power plants whose smokestacks vent the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion. Electric cars don’t have tailpipes, yet most still have a carbon footprint.

Also conveniently missing from the electric vehicle discussion is the environmental damage unleashed by their assembly. Even before their tires hit asphalt, they are belching emissions. Building a Tesla Model S P100D, for example, produces more than 12,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This includes emissions discharged in the mining and transportation of rare earths needed to produce electric cars’ hulking batteries.

Meanwhile, production emissions from a gasoline-guzzling BMW 750i — 17 mpg city, 25 highway — are only 8,190 kilograms of CO2 equivalent. Building a gasoline-powered subcompact Mitsubishi Mirage emits a mere 4,752 kilograms of CO2 equivalent.

Though the BMW’s use emissions are about twice as high as the Tesla’s, the Mirage’s are less than the electric car. The Mirage is also cleaner over its entire lifecycle, which includes emissions produced when an automobile is scrapped. If the electric-vehicle campaign were more about actually cutting emissions and less about virtue signaling and raw politics, wouldn’t Sacramento be pushing us into subcompacts instead of EVs?

Not that that is an acceptable alternative. A nation of ostensibly free people should not be saddled with a 21st century Trabant, the 20th century “peoples car” of the captive East German population.

Given our rich car culture that delights in cubic-inch displacement, and the hum and roar of combustion, it’s reasonable to believe that most Californians would not be terribly interested in EVs if it weren’t for the interventions of political nags. As Pacific Research Institute fellow Wayne Winegarden says in his upcoming electric vehicle study, without the taxpayer-funded subsidies, “a robust EV market will not develop.”

Winegarden’s research proves his point.

“After Hong Kong eliminated its tax break for EVs in April 2017, registrations of new Tesla electric cars in Hong Kong fell from 2,939 to zero,” he says. “Similarly, after Georgia eliminated its $5,000 EV subsidy in 2015, EV sales fell 89 percent in two months.”

Even with as much as $42 billion in spent and promised federal subsidies, and billions more issued by the states, fewer than 352,000 EVs have been sold in the U.S., according to Winegarden. That’s less than one percent of the entire market.

Despite EVs’ thin popularity, policymakers have determined that those are the cars we have to buy. It’s a policy decision sure to create electric-car dissidents who will resent the day they lost their power to choose. The fact that the law is a wholly unnecessary stunt will only make it hurt more.


This article was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily


  1. Can you say: Unscientific Scam?
    Ball to you, Mr. Musk.

    • The absurdity of all this is brought home when you realize that water vapor in the atmosphere is a many times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Let’s see them control that.

  2. I am sick & disgusted with the Calif. DemRat Wanna B Dictators!!! I think they should b investigated & need to take a psychological test! Bunch of DEMONS. Leave us the EEF Alone!

  3. Democrats come up with fantastic ideas to drive business out of state.

  4. Terry Asswipe says

    Why don’t these Liberal ass wipes start showing us how this will happen, by ridding themselves of all transportation for themselves FIRST, NOW. They can walk, ride a bike, ride a horse( shit that won’t work, to much pollution there)

  5. It comes from San Francisco, home of the Pelosis and the 9th circuit what would you expect, the water is contaminated I don’t ting Ting thought this through, he’s just part of the other whackos in the San Fran Bay Area. I always laugh at the commuter lanes here in CA during rush hour traffic they are many times seen empty and the rest of the commuters are at a dead stop burning gas and creating emissions going nowhere and the idiots don’t even care about the added pollution being created, I understand it’s supposedly a reward for going green but it’s only for select green cars and a limited percentage of hybrids, if you buy one after their quota is met you are banned from the commuter lane unless you pick up a hitchhiker. Kind of like when they first started smogging cars, hydrocarbons were reduced but gasoline consumption was increased because cars got fewer mpg as a result of all the add-ons but again the liberal theme applies here, stupid is as stupid does.

  6. The other problem is range. If you live in LA and you want to visit grandma in San Fransisco with a range of 100 miles you will have to stop 4 times for about 8 hours a stop to recharge. This would turn a 6 to 7 hour trip into about a 40 hour trip.

    • Is not the reduction of travel one of the veiled purposes of the socialist
      regimes; Keep the collective animal behavior within the corral.

  7. Why not outlaw Phil Ting?

  8. Cali-wit-flite says

    The global warming fear mongering continues. There will be the largest class action lawsuit filed if this becomes law. Hopefully the nazicrats involved in this will loose everything as a result.

  9. These MF are just trying to see who can get the craziest now. Don’t bogie it pass that s___ around.

  10. The leftist Neanderthal knuckledraggers in the Sakramento Duma are just stupid enough to pass this proposed ting-a-ling legislation. Their motto is “Screw the science, screw the people.”

  11. This is a fraud and I prove it in “CO2 Is Innocent” at Clip copy and print the paper, have it authenticated by any physical scientist or Science teacher. Do the demo-experiment and see the truth.

    Google “Two Minute Conservative” for more.

  12. I’m for state rights but when is enough is enough. These Democrats states are Starting to become authoritarianism, Little dictatorships. banning gas cars. could you imagine what that would do to economy.

  13. Because SF will be much cleaner when they get rid of the pollution emitting gas cars so that the homeless, drug addicted, immigrants can sleep n the sidewalks in their pools of urine and feces without needing to worry about their health.

  14. Andrew Kessel says

    Why should we be forced to drive what L.A. cops won’t even drive?

  15. retiredxlr8r says

    “San Francisco Democrat?”
    Is that synonymous with “Dumb A%%?

  16. Ting certainly has become prolific in his development of bovine excrement legislation in 2018, hasn’t he???
    Probably feeling “marginalized” by DeLeon & Lara…
    What a complete doofus…

  17. And the batteries used to power “LEV”‘s aren’t clean to produce or recycle either, so all this self-congratulatory posturing is just liberal virtue signaling…
    What liberals do best…

  18. “gasoline-powered cars will become the state’s new undocumented immigrants”……..Hell, if thats true, there is nothing to worry about.

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