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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Sales Tenfold.

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter.

That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.

...

The proposed rule would not mandate that electric vehicles make up a certain number or percentage of sales. Instead, it would require that automakers make sure the total number of vehicles they sell each year did not exceed a certain emissions limit. That limit would be so strict that it would force carmakers to ensure that two thirds of the vehicles they sold were all-electric by 2032, according to the people familiar with the matter.

To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.

I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand. And by doing it through the administrative state elected officials never have to take any flack for it. If congress had to pass a bill outlawing incandescent bulbs and the president had to sign it then voters would have someone to get mad at. But when it's a new DOE regulation that just appears, people don't know who to blame. Nobody ever has to argue for it or stake their career on it.

So I don't think things will change. Just like the CDC can declare themselves dictators of all apartment rentals because of the Covid crisis, the EPA can declare itself king of all energy because of the climate crisis. Year after year, more things will be banned, prices will go up and life will get worse. But most people will either not realize the reason or will have entirely forgotten that things used to be different.

So I don't think things will change.

Courts around the western world have been remarkably deferential to this nonsense. And the US courts are (uncharacteristically) more timid and deferential than those in other common-law countries. This is driven in part by a progressive belief in an activist, technocratic state and in part by conservative distrust of judicial activism.

Conservative jurists seem to be slowly coming to their senses. And ithelps good if there is a broader groundswell to support them. I'm glad to see your post -- it's part of that groundswell. But don't be too disheartened - there's incremental progress to be made, and you are helping.

Don't you think that the USA actually has the most aggressive judicial review and interventionist courts of common law countries?

Yes, it does.

But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.

Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.

I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment. The student loan forgiveness plan for example which relies on an overly broad (but textual maybe) definition of what debt relief and emergency mean is likely going to be struck down by the courts. In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.

In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.

I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.

What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.

I blame Woodrow Wilson for the administrative state, as I do for most other woes of the 20th Century.

It depends. It all goes back to that blasted footnote in carolene products (ie economic rights receive effectively no protections; political rights absurd amounts of protection)

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