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well...

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What is actually in the bill? Raising the price doesn't make 50% less gasoline available.

I confess I thought the title "sb 350" was going to be about rodding with a Chevy engine.

Not to worry. An article in the paper this morning says SB 350 is dead. Unfortunately not all the provisions are because some can still be done by existing regulation and others by executive order so that is the approach they are going to take on what they can.

The 50% reduction wasn't going to be because they were going to limit the amount of fuel available -- it was going to be achieved because of new requirements for increased fuel efficiency and an increased percentage of alternative fuel vehicles required to be sold and on the roads.

Be interesting to see if there comes another "clunker" bill to achieve the 50% reduction goals. The last one for achieving pollution goals took untold numbers of decent "old" cars off the road and crushed them so they couldn't even be used for parts. I can see the brain cells whirring with another purge to get the gas guzzlers gone.

At least people in California don't total out their cars in giant potholes like Michigan. I saw one today that was so big it would blow a tire on my car and tear the front suspension out. Yet the government here only cares about making sure more people are on welfare, more people are on drugs, and that car insurance costs more than your car.

Granted I would never live in California. It is overpriced and everybody I know who lost a job there was wiped out in a month. But if Michigan fixed the roads I really wouldn't care what they charged for gas because car repairs run into the thousands.

California is bankrupt and it's just a matter of time before there is a fallout.

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Heaven help us if this is the case. But I agree, it very well may result in another so-called "clunker" bill.

A few points for those who do not know:

? The last so-called "clunker bill" took in thousands upon thousands of cars that were hardly clunkers. Many of them were collector quality. Many were simply older luxury cars that did not have big dollar values at that moment, but were very nice cars. And I know of at least two 1956 Packards that joined the death march. These were running cars, mind you. A neighbor turned in her garage-kept, fully loaded Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz just because "the Bluebook on it is less than what the clunker law will pay me...and I never use the car anyway"...So help me. This was the reasoning. And folks... THIS was a low-mileage, totally rust-free car... with beautiful red leather upholstery that had NOT been sun-baked/fried. It even had the glass moonroof. Had I known she was planning to do that, I would have bought the car myself.

? These cars were certainly not all crushed as people believe. Some of these very nice cars quickly began to appear at junkyards all over the state like "Pick-A-Part"... but the engines and trans had marks and labels all over them indicating they had been purposely sabotaged and could never be used again. One tag claimed that the engine had been run with either metal filings or sand in it until either it conked out or several minutes passed. Some cars with nice interiors had huge "X" letters cut across the seats with a blade.

? Gasoline in most parts of California is already sky-high in price. And has been for decades now. Frankly California's gas prices (and I check them) can be two or even three times higher than other parts of the country. A couple of years ago I was forced to pay OVER $5 a gallon for premium off of the interstate in NorCal. Most people alive today have never paid that much for a single gallon of gas in the USA. The price was so ginormous that I saved the receipt! Parts of L.A. and parts of the Bay Area were likewise going in this direction for a while. Merely crossing the Arizona border on I-10 and buying gas in Arizona can save you as much as 75-cents a gallon or more over California prices!

The problem here with these bills is that the politicians behind them rarely understand the long-term and technological aspects of what they are doing and promoting. Just the knee-jerk-feel-good part. Like the L.A. City Councilman who stood up at a press conference several years ago and announced that he would force 10% of drivers into electric cars by 2005. This drew great applause from enviro-types, but what nobody ever mentioned was...
A.) At that very time, California was already having rolling brown-outs with electrical service shortages. They were telling us to shut off the air conditioning and avoid using the washer and dryer. Can you imagine 10% of Angelinos coming home from work and all plugging in their electric cars each evening?
B.) AND what fossil fuels were going to be used to generate all that extra electrical charging power requirement? And how much?
C.) AND since the majority of the electric cars referred to at the time of the speech were using lead-acid batteries (and we were already trying to remove lead from the environment)... WHERE was all this extra lead AND toxic electrolyte fluid going to go when all these batteries went kaput?

Even the supporters of these slash-and-burn bills are so bent on the feel-good aspect that they don't realize they are often simply shooting themselves in the foot. Or in a combined state of denial and technical ignorance.

In the final analysis, this is the really scary part.