North Carolina Republicans Push Bill Forcing Towns To Destroy Electric Car Chargers
from the legislation-by-brain-fart dept
The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it ever did at all.
Case in point: in North Carolina, Trump GOP lawmaker Ben Moss has pushed forward a ridiculous bill (HB 1049) that would require towns and cities use up to $50,000 in taxpayer funds to destroy free electric vehicle stations on public land, if local authorities don’t build free gas and diesel pumps alongside them. There’s, of course, no provision included in the bill that works in the opposite direction.
The bill is extremely likely the direct result of some local oil industry lobbyist throwing a terrible, ghost written bill in the lap of a corrupt lawmaker who didn’t even bother to read it (how most bills are born these days). Or, it’s an unprompted attention seeking bill by Moss letting his sponsors in the oil industry know he’s ready and excited to play ball as a new lawmaker. Either one is, of course, bad.
Moss, of course, frames the unnecessary law as a benefit to taxpayers:
The bill even goes so far as to include a bizarre little measure requiring that any person or company that puts a free electric charging station on their property, itemize “the percentage of the amount of the customer’s total purchase price that is a result of the business providing electric vehicle charging stations at no charge” on every receipt for every purchase.
It’s a dumb little way to generate ire among customers who don’t use the charging station that they’re paying for through their purchases. And the bill itself is a desperate quest to stall the progress of organic electric market growth on behest of an industry not keen on disruption. All dressed up, as Trump Republicans love to do, as some kind of exciting, big win for the little guy.
The bill (which can be tracked here) hasn’t been passed and isn’t likely to now that it has received nationwide attention for being monumentally stupid. But I’ve seen countless, very similar bills (especially related to telecom and community broadband) that often see no such attention or challenge on their way from dumb, corruption-fueled brain fart to dumb, corruption-fueled law.
Filed Under: ben moss, corruption, electric vehicles, legislation, north carolina, oil
Comments on “North Carolina Republicans Push Bill Forcing Towns To Destroy Electric Car Chargers”
Republicans seem really focused in leading the US to their demise (values, freedom etc) along with the rest of humanity (environmental destruction).
How do you stop one of the most powerful nations, full of nukes, from imploding itself and screwing the rest of us in the process?
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Marburg.
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Right now there’s monkey pox going around. Monkey pox is related to smallpox. You follow me?
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How? Destroy liberalism. It is evil and one of the worst mental disorders known.
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Liberalism is a philosophy built on the concept of personal freedom, from Latin “līber” (free, unrestricted”). It believes that individuals should be free to make choices best for them (without harming others) and that society as a whole will be more innovative, fair, and tolerant as a result.
What’s your beef with that?
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Perhaps Rob was talking about the political philosophy of Liberalism, which is indeed evil in the way it’s practiced.
That's not a lobby-written bill
Lobbyists are not that stupid. It’s a trolloping bill, signaling easy availability of someone who is excited of finally being in the market of selling themselves. Rest assured that he’ll be taken up on that offer and get some sponsors who will put a bit more finesse to his prostrate bills.
This man’s hatred of electric cars is unheard of. What’s next? Him leading angry mobs to hang electric cars from trees?
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Are all of you ok with only SOME people getting free fuel but not others?
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Yes? Should I be jelly or angry about it?
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There’s a difference in kind here. Some solar panels and a charging station is a relatively small, upfront investment. For gasoline, you need an oil derrick, refinery, gas tank, and pump, plus whatever pipelines or trucks you plan on moving the stuff about in (I don’t think NC sits on an oil field), plus the personnel required to work each of those.
If you don’t see a difference there…I’m not sure I can help you.
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Here’s the thing, fuel companies get subsidies that are supposed to go back to the consumer in the form of reduced prices but never do. Whereas ‘free’ charging is paid for by the taxpayer like the subsidies are, and actually come back to the consumer every time they charge their EV. Which do you prefer?
here’s the thing though….
our town.. which is probably as red as NC. put in EV charging stations… and it’s a source of revinue for the town. ie. the town is selling power to charge EVs.
I mean, it’s not much, I see maybe 5 cars charging there a week, it’s a small town out in the middle of nowhere, but it does two things, it puts a charging station out here in the middle of nowhere, and the town gets some change out of it.
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It’s like the opposite of what the Interstate did to towns along Route 66. Now your little town is a more attractive road trip stop for people with EVs.
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Yes. Nothing wrong with that.
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NC is more purple than blue. Not it stops the local GOP from trying to turn it into a one party dictatorship.
I would be perfectly happy with them requiring free gas pumps alongside EV chargers, as long as those pumps delivered fuel at a maximum rate of a gallon per hour.
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IV drip
Re: Way too generous.
On a typical commercial 30A charger, I get about 24 miles of range added per hour, for which I pay about $0.70. Perhaps they could amend the bill to give gas or diesel at the rate of $0.70 per hour parked there – so about 6-7 hours/gallon. It has the added benefit of reducing emissions as the car is off for 5-6 days while filling its tank.
Also, for Bill Moss who wants to see American made electric cars: cars.com does an “American-Made Index” which measures how much “American” is actually in car models sold in the US. For 2021, #1 and #3 on the list were the Tesla Model 3 and the Tesla Model Y, respectively. Where is your car on that list, Bill?
Minds
If consistency is the hobgoblin of little Minds, our republican friends have very large minds.
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The quote is “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.
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And how is it not better to be a consistent fool than an inconsistent one? 😉
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Every projection a confession! 😉
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I wasn’t actually projecting because, unlike you, I have no problem owning up to my shit.
Nothing organic going on here
There’s nothing organic about something being pushed by spending government $$$ to significantly reduce the cost of it. Not saying it’s good or bad that we’re choosing to subsidize the huge cost of electric vehicles, just pointing out that pretending that the growth of the electric market has been anything natural or “organic” is just flat wrong.
If we’re going to have any hope of making honest progress improving here we need to be aware of the actual costs we’re putting in to get there.
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Nobody is pretending that the EV market is developing at its “natural” pace. It’s policy-driven for sure. Like the hydrogen vehicle development it suffers from the problem of kicking the can down the road: it stops the dependency on one particular energy source but there is no real storyline about what primary energy source is to replace oil here.
If there is no answer to that, we’ll have a lot of vehicles taken off the road for a lack of affordable energy, electric or not.
And one problem is that the EV activism is detracting from solving the principal problem, namely our live styles being far too energy intense to be compatible with maintaining a habitable planet. Even futuristic “sustainable” things like giant mirrors in space beaming microwaves to receivers on planet surface suffer from releasing more energy on Earth than the current sun exposure.
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There’s plenty of clean renewable energy available.
“A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use.”
And that’s just solar. The problem is where we’re getting the energy, not how much energy we’re using.
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
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Wait til you find out about the massive subsidies we give to fossil fuel companies.
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That is just good old trickle-down economy and a substantial portion ends up in the pockets of our lawmakers, benefitting us all.
One would be tempted to state that EVs just don’t have established the same infrastructure yet, except, well, guess where pretty much all energy to be put into EVs is supposed to come from.
And yet...
The state offers numerous tax incentives to try to lure business to the state. See: https://edpnc.com/why-north-carolina/incentives/.
Offering free charging is a way to draw potentially new business into a downtown business district. It is the *hyper-local* version of the state-incentivized tax deals. I make use of one such station in mid Michigan, and I will often have breakfast or dinner at one of the nearby restaurants… something I would not have done, if there weren’t free power in that business district.
are they doing this just because they’re as stupid as Trump is and they just want to back him? surely they’re not doing themselves any favors of winning seats at the elections!
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Oh, but they are, just look at all those campaign contributions. It is the voters who are voting to be screwed over by these clowns.
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And the voters keep on voting for them.
Granted, he’s probably gerrymandered so anything short of a dump on the front door of Trump Tower will get him reelected.
So...
My home charger does 32A/240V so 8kW/hr. Most “free” chargers are about the same. At 10¢/kW, that’s 80 cents an hour. I bet the floodlights illuminating the gas station’s pump area use more power than that.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it smart.”
Corruption-fueled, and fuel-corrupted
I can sort of see their point. Why is the government paying to charge electric vehicles? I know it isn’t expensive but it’s just another government give away for a small portion of the population. Why should I, a tax payer, supplement the income of other tax payers? If you look at the price of electric cars, you have to be a taxpayer in order to afford an electric car. Just reduce taxes and be done with it. Everyone benefits.
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I forgot to add that they shouldn’t destroy the chargers. They should change them to accept payment and treat them as a revenue source.
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The thought is that it increases the adoption-rate of EV’s, and when you hit a certain threshold you start charging for charging (no pun intended).
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There are external costs to society of using fossil fuels, such as air pollution and climate change, that users don’t pay for, so making UV chargers free is only fair.
I won’t say there’s no such thing as a good Republican, but I will suggest you’re most likely to find them in your local cemetery.
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I suggest that you compare the agendas of the Whig Party and of the Republican Party split off under Lincoln.
The problem is not that it’s hard to find good Republicans these days. The problem is that it’s hard to find any at all.
I am pretty sure that Lincoln would have quite different ideas about who to label “Republican in name only” than, well, Trump and his acolytes have. It’s actually embarrassing that there really is no sensible way around mentioning the has-been Trump when looking at what the Republican Party is these days.
But then it’s not that Trump moved what the Republican Party is about. It’s more that he taught them being shameless about it.
He’d know the answer to the question spelling the beginning of the downfall of McCarthy (the old one, not related to the current embarrassment): “Do you have no shame?”.
He hasn’t, and he’s proud of it. And that is the kind of freedom the Republican Party has been yearning for.
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He’d know the answer to the question spelling the beginning of the downfall of McCarthy (the old one, not related to the current embarrassment): “Do you have no shame?”
Which McCarthy was it that went on a snark hunt after ‘Reds in the shed’? 😉
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GFY.
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Why don’t you take your own advice, Trump sycophant.
Democrats NEVER do this kind of thing, only "Trump Republicans"?
Because Democrats never pull this kind of stupidity. No, never. Only “Trump Republicans” as though that’s another party?
Come on. Stop calling yourself a journalist. You tout this site as journalistic. Give the crap a rest. Trump’s an idiot, but stop trying to gain readers stoking other idiot fires.
This is a dumb thing to do, just on its face. Just say that already.
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Coming to a conclusion based on preconceptions and laziness. My suggestion is that you stop commenting until informed yourself – because there are many articles on Techdirt pointing out idiocy that Democrats also do.
Now, there’s a difference in the stupid things they do – Republican’s stupidity is mostly manifested as performative, anti democratic or just plain batshit crazy while the Democrats stupidity is manifested as trying to fix things that actually makes it worse.
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Actually (sadly) the democrats’ stupidity is trying to do the right thing, and thinking somehow their (maybe not entirely, but at least mostly) logical bills will appeal to enough republicans to ensure passage.
Unfortunately, the days of republicans (all senators and most representatives( voting their conscience (or voting for legislation that might actually be good for the country) are long gone. Now they vote in lockstep against anything democrats propose. The dynamic was already headed this way, but it became the standard once McConnell said his goal was to prevent any democratic bills from succeeding…
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Actually (sadly) the democrats’ stupidity is trying to do the right thing, and thinking somehow their (maybe not entirely, but at least mostly) logical bills will appeal to enough republicans to ensure passage.
Actually, they do. The issue is it’s because the bills are so broken they won’t have the imagined effect, but the Democrats writing them are too stupid to see that even when it’s pointed out to them.
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No, there are enough Democratic-sponsored bills that are stupid on their own merits without a reasonable view to blame Republicans for it. And Techdirt points out a fair share of them.
As you cross from utterly misguided to outright malicious, there does seem to be more of a Republican tendency to go right off the cliff.
A two-party system is too coarse to represent a fine-grained spectrum of common sense. It’s not much of a surprise that there is a lot of infighting in the Democratic Party for that reason.
What is disconcerting is that there is rather little infighting in the Republican Party, and it’s not because everybody is sane and reasonable.
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And there are enough people dumb enough to pick up on something quoted by another commenter and respond to it as though it’s part of that commenter’s argument when context shows they’re arguing against it. Pro tip: read more.
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As you cross from utterly misguided to outright malicious…
And now I’ve just seen the reason for you misreading the quoted portion of the comment: it’s deliberate. You’re a hypocritical troll attacking others for you own offenses.
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Yes, because it’s only “bipartisan” if republicans agree with and vote for democrat ideas. Such an asinine commment.
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Why so ignorant of the fact that America is effectively a two-party state? Trump sycophant.
There's free gas stations on public land
You complain the reverse isn’t true. But are there any free gas stations on public land? I mean, if the reverse was added to the law, what affect would it have had? If there’s no free gas on public land right now, then saying any free gas stations on public land has to have free charging stations wouldn’t cost anything.
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But are there any free gas stations on public land?
No, but there are massive subsidies paid to fuel companies from public money, which is similar (if worse).
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The EV industry has massive subsidies as well.
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Which get given to the consumer in the form of free charging, whereas the subsidies paid to oil fuel companies never get given back in the form of reduced prices like they’re supposed to. Your point?
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False equivalence.
Subsidies to speed up adoption of a new, better system are good. Bigger subsidies for a corrupt, incumbent system that doesn’t need it: not so much.
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The truth is RMB is a troll, and the “R” stands for “Republican”. Thus the nature of their attacks.
Stupid in the eyes of the viewer
Many topics. Many concerns.
Easy fix, if you don’t like the prices go elsewhere. Sod off. End of discussion. Private business.
Well, why should the general public pay to fuel private cars?!!!!?
What bothers me here is the “destroy” aspect. The thing missing from the bill is an incentive to convert the free stations to competitively priced pay stations.
State or federal, government is doing to much give without equal cutting elsewhere.
There is not a state in the union, nor the federal government, that couldn’t balance the budget and support all the post 2020 socialisation simply by cutting stupid spending elsewhere.
Destroying, via public money, rather than conversion to a cash sink, is downright idiotic.
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Wow. The troll that accused ECA of being polarized has clearly never read any of your posts.
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You may have missed my point.
I A) want paid charging stations on public land
And
B) think paid charging stations are a good way for government earning
Along with that I believe spending to remove public charging stations outright is ludicrous!
A typical sign of partisan stupidity. Spend money to build. Then spend money to destroy.
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Here’s what you’re missing: if governments site free charging stations on public land in shopping districts, people are tempted to go off spending while they wait for their EV to charge up, raising revenue for the town. In addition, if companies like Shell have free charging stations on their forecourts and towns have to charge for theirs, guess where that spending money’s more likely to go.