Proposed California Car Ban a Perfect Mix of Hubris and Silliness: New at Reason

A bill in California seeks to ban registration of vehicles that aren’t zero emissions, in 2040.

Steven Greenhut writes:

It’s about time that members of Congress and the California legislature got really serious about combating the nation’s pollution problem. Just as Jonathan Swift had a “modest proposal” to keep poor Irish children from being a burden to their families and their country (by selling them to wealthy English people as food), I, too, have a modest proposal for dealing with the unconscionable level of pollutants that are emitted in the U.S. to produce electricity. Let’s propose a plan to shut down the nation’s power plants.

The facts are unmistakable: An environmental group in 2009 reported that the “nation’s power plants emitted 2.56 billion tons of global warming pollution… which is equivalent to the pollution from nearly 450 million of today’s cars—nearly three times the number of cars registered in the United States in 2007.” Even cleaner natural-gas fired plants, which have become more prevalent in ensuing years, “release 21—120 times more methane than earlier estimates,” according to a summary of a Purdue University/Environmental Defense Fund report from last year.

Do you care about clear air, the health of our children and the future of the planet? Of course you do. So there’s little reason to complain about this idea. Before you chalk it up to one columnist’s silliness, consider that some California policy makers are proposing something equally “modest” and ludicrous. Yet they seem totally serious about it.

View this article.