Silly no-no's!

California passes bill cutting cars’ carbon dioxide

The California Legislature has handed automakers a major defeat by approving a controversial bill that would make the state the first in the nation to regulate vehicle emissions tied by many scientists to global warming.

Only, humans contribute just 3% of the carbon dioxide in the air. What percentage does California contribute?

Well, let's guesstimate based on the figures at this site, for which I cannot vouch, but since he seems to support this entire effort to reduce carbon dioxide production, he's good to go for this argument.

Unfortunately he uses pretty pictures instead of numbers, the better to show how horrible things are. Looks like the US of A cranks out around 1,350,000,000 metric tons annually, whilst California puffs out 9,500,000. Hmm, get out my calculator here.... So, California produces 0.7% of the US total. The US produces 25% of the world total for carbon dioxide produced by human activity. (See that 3% link above.) That means California contributes 0.175% of the US total, and that's 0.00525% of the total amount of carbon dioxide produced annually (from all sources, man-made and otherwise).

i.e. - Eliminating 100% of California's human activity based carbon dioxide production means precisely dick to the total worldwide production.

This is the victory of symbolism over substance. What are the possible results? Oh, the easiest way for auto manufacturers to meet these requirements is to restrict the types of vehicles they sell in California. There is no emissions control device that can make this happen, so you 1) alter the power source or 2) reduce the per vehicle production. Any of the former are still untenable and the latter is easy; smaller cars, smaller engines, less production.

Which, tada, is the real goal.