Ordering Californians to buy electric cars isn’t enough. Golden State regulators’ next move will force rail shipping companies to switch to all-electric locomotives — even though, outside of toy train sets, the technology isn’t mature enough for cargo use.
Then, as now, batteries can’t muster enough juice to haul 20,000 tons of commodities from one end of the nation to the other — at least not without replacing a single diesel locomotive with a number of expensive electric ones. Such concerns don’t matter to California bureaucrats with a compulsive need to signal they’re more environmentally virtuous than any other jurisdiction in the country.
Forcing companies to divert the majority of their capital away from things like safety for the sake of satisfying the egos of West Coast liberals will drive up the cost of everything that makes its way to the store over a train track. With more than 160 million tons of cargo entering or leaving California in a year, the impact will be substantial.