By Emily Cadei | The Sacramento Bee
Democrats running for president had a message for Americans on Wednesday night: you are going to have to wean yourselves off your gas-powered cars.
“It’s not something you have to do. It’s awesome,” entrepreneur Andrew Yang joked.
That didn’t satisfy CNN host Wolf Blitzer, who pressed Yang during Wednesday’s live presidential town hall on climate change. “What’s the answer? Are we all going to have to drive electric cars?” Blitzer asked.
“We are all going to love driving our electric cars,” replied Yang, while conceding “there will still be some legacy gas guzzlers on the road for quite some time, because this is not a country where you’re going to, like, take someone’s clunker away from them.”
Over and over, Yang’s fellow candidates made the same point when it was their turn to answer questions on their plans to combat climate change. While the 2020 Democrats vary in the precise method and timeline for doing so, they agree that transportation in America must change dramatically in a matter of a few decades or less.
“By my plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only,” California Sen. Kamala Harris said during the town hall. “100 percent by 2045.”
