By Eric Peters
One of the useful things about being able to get my hands on new vehicles is to convey to people what they may not know about them. Sometimes, I get to know about things, too. Here’s a case in point:
Every new vehicle sent to me for test-driving and reviewing comes with what’s styled a Monroney – the auto industry jargon term for what most people not in the business call a window sticker. The window sticker details the standard and optional equipment and the Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for them, so that potential buyers know something about what these items cost the dealer. Prior to the Monroney – named after Oklahoma Sen. Mike Monroney, who sponsored what became a federal requirement back in 1958 – car dealers were not required to disclose the MSRP and so were more free to suggest whatever prices they wanted to suggest.
Well, getting back to the point of this column, I found something else on the Monroney that came with the ’25 Ram 2500 I recently test-drove (review is here, if interested) Occupying a full fourth of the thing – the entirety of the top right side of the thing – was a box titled Environmental Performance. It lists the “performance” of the Ram 2500 as regards its “emissions” of “Greenhouse Gasses” – which interestingly does not include water vapor, the most potent of “greenhouse” gasses. In part because there is so much H2O in the atmosphere. It is why the sky is blue. It is why it rains. It is why it feels muggy when it’s humid.
Never mind. Probably because it’s difficult to frame water vapor as a “pollutant.”
Instead, Environmental Performance focuses on CO2, the trace atmospheric gas (0.04 percent of the whole) a fraction of which is “emitted” by running engines. We are supposed to believe – we are heavily pressured to believe – that adding a fraction to a fraction is causing the “climate” to “change” in some vague but always apocalyptically imminent way and that the only way to prevent the always-imminent apocalypse (it has been predicted to arrive “soon” every year for the past five decades at least) is for us to drastically reduce what is styled our “carbon footprint.” This vague term means we accept living without things – most especially vehicles with engines.
It goes without saying that this goes only for us.
The few who are fomenting fear of the always apocalyptically imminent “climate catastrophe” will of course not have to turn down – much less turn off – the AC (or the heat) or give up driving (or flying) or the eating of meat rather than a meal made of crushed bugs.
To get there, the gaslighting must continue. Of a piece with how you were going to put granny in the ground if you didn’t wear a maaaaaaaask.
Hence the merely “C+” grade the Ram got, accordng to the sticker, for its Environmental Performance. But it did get a “B+” insofar as its Smog Rating, which is not surprising given no vehicle made since the mid-late 1990s produces any meaningful precursors of that. To know the truth of that, just look at the sky. It’s blue – excepting those chemtrails, of course – which are emissions the government doesn’t seem to mind. Smog – air pollution – ceased being an issue about 30 years ago, the time by which every vehicle came standard with three-way cats, electronic fuel injection and computer controlled engine management. These things eliminated 95-plus percent of the meaningfully harmful emissions that cause or worsen air pollution. Since the early-mid 2000s, the “reductions” have been fractional and so meaningless, except insofar as the costs of compliance.
But the show must go on. For the sake of compliance.
There’s another interesting thing about the Monroney that came with the Ram. It is that the box dedicated to Environmental Performance was emitted, apparently, by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). It is interesting because I do not live in California and the Ram wears Michigan plates. What has California got to do with either? More finely, doesn’t the jurisdiction of a California bureaucracy end at the California border?
No, it doesn’t.
Not when t least a third of the other states have mirrored what CARB has decreed. That serves to impose a de facto national mandate issued by a California regulatory bureaucracy because it’s simply too expensive and too difficult for the vehicle manufacturers to emit California (and mirror-state) compliant vehicles – and Monroneys – and then another batch for the remaining third or so that have not yet mirrored California.
You may have heard – and may believe – that the Orange Man put an end to all of that. He didn’t. All he did was put an end (for now) to a requirement California laid down about the selling of EVs, to the exclusion of vehicles that aren’t. He did nothing about the federal regs – or CARB’s regs – that effectively force the manufacturing of EVs and so they are all still in force.
And so the gaslighting continues.
