California law bans small off-road gas engines, including lawnmowers and chainsaws

[bertsmobile1]

Yeah, I read they're planning on shutting down two Nuclear plants (stupid) and another one, I cannot remember what flavor fossil fuel that powers it.

However, they dont have replacement power plants for those they're shutting down, so they will be hurting more! All in the name of "going green".

BTW, a plant that uses wood, as in cutting forest trees down, to heat the steam boilers qualifies as a "renewable energy" powered plant. Does that make any sense? Of course not, but it's all a shell game to appease those who think it's going to be better.

That is in fact a little less damaging than using gas or coal as you are consuming the energy that fell on the plant in recient times , not what has bee squirled away umpteen million years ago
This is the problem with the empathise on CO2
CO2 IS NOT THE PROBLEM
Heat imbalance is the problem, and CO2 only plays a tiny part of it
The combined heat from the sun + what we make is more than can get radiated out overnight so we just keep on getting hotter .
A very big ( in fact bigger ) part of the problem is all of the heat that falls on land that no longer has any plants growing on it
The plants convert the heat into chemical energy which is used to make mass , cellulose , basically according to the famous E=MC 2 equation backwards
Get a thermometer and read the temperature inside your house, outside your house, on the driveway, on the lawn, on the lawn and if available under trees and the tree canopy itself.
Do it at midday and midnight
Good chance even at midnight the road & driveway will still be hotter than the grass and the air so will still be radiating heat into the atmosphere .
As such, solar is the winner hands down as it directly converts the sun's energy into electricity = plus some waste heat but in the morning your solar panel will be quite cold while your tile roof will still be hotter than the surrounding air.
But like idiots in place of putting them in cities to reduce the heat sink effect of all of the concrete we cut down forests and build solar farms which are far less efficient in adsorbing solar energy than a forest is and buggers up water cycles as well.
But putting cells on city & urban roofs makes it hard ( near impossible ) to balance the power grid & ever harder to run the network & make you pay for power so the electricity supply company has little to sell but all of the costs of maintaining the grid ( a lot more expensive than most would believe )/
Add to that solar panels on the roof keep the house cooler and cooling uses a lot more energy than heating and remember all of the cold inside adds more heat outside so makes the city hotter for longer so the air conditioning is on all night .
Large scale rapid breeder power stations were a BS idea from day one
Their prime purpose was to generate scrap plutonium that was cheaply converted into atomic warheads.
Take that away and the plants are by & large uneconomic as the power sold never covers the construction & maintenance costs let alone the proper disposal of the waste .
Pebble bed & liquid salt reactors are economic to run and in particular the liquid salt reactors are 100 safe because if the reactor fails the salt solidifies and reaction stops so the only danger is ionizing the air which is not really a problem that is easy to overcome ( dump lead oxide, Boron oxide , waste plutonium granules or any one of a squillion dense materials .)
So if burning coal is a 10 then gas would be a 6 and fresh cut wood would be a 5

 

[shurguywutt]

Our planet's cycles are far more complex than one can imagine. Even scientists don't understand most of the time. The real problem is that people think the earth is going to last forever. It definitely won't in its current form. Nothing from our DNA or your wife's kitchen gets better if left to the mercy of time. Just take a look at your highschool yearbook photo and compare it to how you look now. The 2nd LAW of thermodynamics states that entropy aka disorder (destruction) increases with time in an open system (ie. the earth). Only man in his arrogance will foolishly believe he can stop time's arrow, he cannot. Any mandate just comes back to the love of/lust for money, power, and control.

For a deeper study on how things inevitably will end, I believe there is a book about it - the number one seller of all time. In fact, the things going on today start to make a lot more sense now.

Back to mowers guys ?

 

[bertsmobile1]

Well eventually the sun will explode but fortunately I will be gone by many millions years by then.
However I would like it to last for the last 3 decades of my life & I seriously doubt it will the way we are going.
I have been here for 13 years and in that time we have had 3 ( once in 100 year floods ) and 3 major bushfires each & every one worse has been worse than the previous by a substantial amount .
Each & every drought has been bigger and lasted for longer than the previous one
Each & every flood has been bigger than the last
For the fist time in our recorded history we have had tornadoes in NSW .
And it would go further back in time than that because the local indiginious peoples do not have a word to describe a tornado and their culture & language goes back at least 80,000 years

So what was being said in my university days has come to pass, more extreme weather conditions.
Unfortunately the media at the time used the most dire of the forwarnings like a 2 meter rise in sea level to ridicule & discredit all of the work
here was an interesting paper nearly 10 years ago I listened to that looked at the consequences of altering the weight of the poles.
Back then it was considered pure fantasy but now we are faced with an artic ocean free of block ice and an anartic ice shelf getting thicker
there is a tipping point where this could cause a larger than normal shift in the tilt and a few degrees could make a massive difference, particularly to ocean currents so the UK could end up just as cold as Iceland & the great lakes of the USA / Canada frozen over all year Autralia's rainfall would become almost non existant except at the very top where it would be flooded several times a year.
All of course highly subjective and based on computer modeling which was even then only rated as 40% accurate

Both sides exaggerate to the point of a lie which of course confuses Joe public no end .
But of course there is no planet B to use for experimenting with so erring on the side of caution with planet A would be considered prudent.
However just about every government is hostage to vested interest who profit from excessive consumption of short life products be it coal, oil, cars , shirts, shoes houses or even entire cities
And this is being demonstrated perfectly here with the Cal legialation
The millionares want to fly their private jets and the travel / tourism industry want millions of bums to fly in and out every day to fill their cash registers .
So they ban some thing that at best would account for 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 % of Cal's air pollution while planning for more airports and larger cities.

In a rather heated exchange with one of the apartment living self appointed planet saviours we did a calculation about 2 stroke lawn mowers
Assuming that every one of the 1.75 million houses in Sydney used their 2 stroke Victa lawn mower for 2 hours ( 2 liters of fuel ) 52 weeks a year the amount of oil discharged into the atmosphere from the exhausts works out to 1 days worth of unburned jet A1 spewed out the back of the jets using Sydney airport and we are now building a bigger one .
She did the calculaltions about 3 times had the rest of the panel triple checking the statistics , then went red, got teary and raced off the stage,
There is a massive difference between doing some thng that will make a difference and being seen to be doing something for the sake of looking like you are doing something.

 

[slomo]

Next up in Kali is a ban on all hydro mowers. Going back to belt drives. All that hydro fluid being dumped illegally. LOL

 

[enigma-2]

Interesting thread. But I'm surprised that no one has commented on California's mandate that all of new car sales will be zero-emission by 2035 (new bus and truck sales to be zero-emission by 2045).

The way the law is written, it's based on "if feasible ". I doubt that gas powered generators can be replaced with current technology. Lawn mowers and trimmers, yes.

Sadly, there's no way to clean up a lawn mower engine the same way CARB leaned up automobiles. I believe that would have been the best compromise.

 

[BudLight]

Interesting thread. But I'm surprised that no one has commented on California's mandate that all of new car sales will be zero-emission by 2035 (new bus and truck sales to be zero-emission by 2045).

The way the law is written, it's based on "if feasible ". I doubt that gas powered generators can be replaced with current technology. Lawn mowers and trimmers, yes.

Sadly, there's no way to clean up a lawn mower engine the same way CARB leaned up automobiles. I believe that would have been the best compromise.

I mentioned that diesel/gas freight trucks were headed for the guillotine in 2035 but I thought that was the date they would banned from use in California making electric powered trucks mandatory. Do they get to continue their use to end of life, or will they all be abandoned along the highway?

 

[bertsmobile1]

At the moment no one has a viable zero emission delivery vehicle
They have small delivery vans but the battery pack weighs in at over a ton all by itself . Add another ton of chassis & body work and you are at 2 ton empty which gives them a payload of 1 ton or less without going to duel wheels and the range is very short without 2 tons of battery .
Big transport will go to a hydrogen powered IC engine, they are already using them off road in mining & earthworks and the running costs are actually lower than diesel .
The big problem is stopping the hydrogen going bang big time in a collision / rollover because we can not separate compressed liquified hydrogen from hydrogen gas ( think Hindenberg ) in our minds.
The problem with using hydrogen is the current production of hydrogen is very very dirty and clean green hydrogen is rather like atomic fusion, always 5 to 10 years away from being commercially viable .
Busses can be replaced with trams or trolleys easily enough but every one in the burbs will bitch about the wires . The push bike riders will bitch about tram lines and sue every time they get caught in one & fall off. The grid will have to double if not triple it's capacity and during things like earth quakes there will be no mass transport .
We have been trialing battery busses and while the customers really like them because they are quiet and don't shake. again battery capacity is the big problem.
Li batteries like to be run down to 10 - 20 % before recharging which means on longer runs a recharge mid run or top them up at every terminus stop.
To get the maximum life from the current Li batteries they need to be recharged as few times as possible and only charged to around 90 %
Even then most busses would require 2 if not more charges a day so the battery life will be down to around the 3 to 5 year mark which will make them 2 times more expensive to run as diesel powered busses
OTOH converting busses will make a bigger difference to emissions than private cars as down here most go through 200 gallons of diesel every day and in Sydney alone there is 210,000 busses.
People have a funny idea about emissions
In Sydney there is around 1,250.000 cars on the road each working day, but those vehicles , excluding the 20,000 taxis are only on the road for a couple of hours in the morning & afternoon where as the busses and delivery vans are on the road all day every day and there are close to 500,000 of them.
Which brings me back to the original point I was making
Private EV's are nothing but virtue signaling by the wealthy ( usually ) to pretend they are better than the plebs where as they are the biggest part of the problem.
And Musk is just a show man concerned with nothing else other than lining his pockets at the expense of every other person & the planet itself .

 

[enigma-2]

Do they get to continue their use to end of life, or will they all be abandoned along the highway?

It is my understanding that the date is for sale of new vehicles only and they will continue to use the roads for decades to come.

 

[BudLight]

It is my understanding that the date is for sale of new vehicles only and they will continue to use the roads for decades to come.

Well that’s confusing because I thought that older trucks (pre-2011) were already banned unless their engines were modified to meet emission standards met by the newer trucks. Actually what they’re doing is refusing to provide them with registrations (tags).

 

[enigma-2]

The current CARB regs require the newer engine on trucks over a certain weight (think it was 10k but don't hold me to that) by the end of next year. (And I believe that there are exceptions for low milage trucks. Think it was something low like 1k miles/yr.). I think your right about not being able to register an older truck with an older engine.

The new regs mandate zero-emission vehicles. As I read it, it only applied to vehicles sold. And even then it only applies to half of the fleet sold, although that increases each year to 100%. I don't remember reading that existing vehicles (other that those already governed under current CARB rules) be removed. But in 20 years there won't be many left. (And good luck selling them inside CA).