California to Ban New Gas-Powered Cars by 2035

Last Thursday the California Air Resources Board (CARB) voted to approve a regulation that phases out the sale of new gas-powered cars, trucks and SUVs by 2035. The rule phases it in with a few steps. By 2026, 35% of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the state must be either zero-emission, plug-in hybrid, or hydrogen-powered models. The target rises to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035. Existing vehicles are not affected, nor are sales of used vehicles. Example news coverage: NPR article, 25 Aug 2022; NY Times article, 29 Aug 2022.

It'll be interesting to see what comes from this. So far we've been stuck in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation where some automakers say, "The demand's not there," while many buyers say, "The choices aren't there." To be sure, there's a lot of development left to be done on providing more choices— and more affordable prices. The EVs sold today are expensive compared to the average new passenger vehicle. A government mandate would help break through the problem of manufacturers waiting on an answer to the chicken-and-egg question. And even though this is just one state's policy, not a nationwide policy, California is both (a) a huge market within the US and (b) a first mover on automobile & climate policy that many other states copy.

Tioga Pass-ing Through... This Time not at Midnight!

Wow, it's taken me 10 weeks to catch up on blogging about a three-day weekend trip we did back in June. With this entry I'm done. I'll have met my goal of getting it done by August! Of course, that's after I had a goal of getting it done by July. 😅 Anyway, set the dials on your DeLorean back to Jun 20, 2022....

After we finished hiking the sand tufa Mono Lake and climbing the continent's youngest mountain at Panum Crater we were ready to call it a day. Well, not really a day because (a) it was only 2:30pm and (b) we still had 5-ish hours of driving to get home. Oh, and (c) our driving route went straight through Yosemite National Park. You can't just drive through Yosemite and not stop. Shoot, we drove through at midnight a few days earlier and even then we stopped to gaze at the beauty. At midnight. It was nearly pitch black everywhere we looked, but still we stopped.



The scenery at Yosemite starts before you even reach the park. From the east there's the Tioga Pass, with a mile-deep canyon (photo above) you climb to reach the park's entrance station.

Once you top out the Tioga Pass at 10,000' it's (nearly) all downhill from there.



At 10,000' in June the park was clear of snow, though patches of it lingered on mountainsides. The mountains in the photo above are the Kuna Crest, reaching to over 12,000'.



Up here in the Yosemite high country there are views in nearly every direction. Though we aren't hiking on this trip, just passing through the Tioga Pass, we still stopped a number of times to hop out, breathe the fresh air, look around, and take pictures. With how often we stopped in the first mile inside the park you'd almost think we'd never been here before instead of this being, I dunno, our umpteenth visit in umpteen-plus years. Yosemite never gets old.



After a few stops in the Tioga Pass area we continued west... and hit the construction zone. There was no construction work going on when we passed through at midnight a few days earlier, but today at 4pm or so the trucks and workers were out, and the road was down to a single lane with controlled one-way traffic. Ordinarily we'd have stopped in Tuolumne Meadow for pictures, but there was no stopping due to the construction.

By the time we cleared the construction, afternoon clouds had moved in over us. We made a few more stops but the pictures didn't out so great. One I will share, though, involves a Yosemite landmark....



It's Half Dome, of course, though from a perspective not everybody's familiar with. This (photo above) is a view from Olmstead Point. From here Half Dome looks tall but not really tall. That's because the peak tops out below 9,000' elevation. That's still nearly 5,000' above the floor of Yosemite Valley, which is why it's such a noted landmark. But from here it's just one of many.