this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Just one example: the state made sale of new internal combustion cars illegal at a certain point in the future, at a time when the electrical grid is unreliable.
This is a way of trying to use government power to fight global warming.
But it hurts people. It’s a state where the general philosophy of “sacrifice poor people to save the planet” is being enacted in government policy.
Are the poor buying new cars? With a greater supply of evs, the poor will buy used evs which require less maintenance, other than new batteries that can be financed.
EDIT: to be fair, you used to be able to buy a used foreign car for $500 (foreign for reliability) and even the cheapest ev (with actual usable range) costs 10 times as much, mostly because of the battery. The fuel costs are lower but the up front costs are higher.
I don't know much about this topic, but it can generally be said that cutting off the supply of new anything necessarily reduces its availability in the secondhand market and that this will also produce an increase in price.
I agree with your edit. Those below the poverty line shouldn't/can't finance an EV battery. Combustion cars can be purchased for ~$500 and are usually fixable for only a few hundred dollars with enough time and tools. Most engine problems are more expensive in labor than in parts, so almost anyone can fix for cheap with YouTube tutorials. If all else fails, junk yards are full of parts, including engines and transmissions.
Even if EVs may have better reliability, when it comes time to sell it, someone in poverty can't afford to buy and fix it. The raw materials in the battery are worth too much, and the batteries don't last forever.
People may not have (or have access to) banking, financing, etc and shouldn't need to finance everything in their life. Financing is like a tax on the poor.
Hopefully these things change in the future, public transit improves, we make combustion cars cleaner, or batteries get cheaper, but right now it's the poorest that will be paying most for this environmental crisis.
It's still capitalism.
As opposed to....? Are you saying that collective ownership over the means of production would solve this problem, or that under communism people just simply wouldn't be able to have cars?