California lawmakers risk ‘gigantic costs’ to cut emissions in transportation
“They are making a political effort to address the problem [of climate change] as they see it. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to have gigantic costs,” Nick Zaiac told the Washington Examiner. Zaiac is a fellow at the R street institute, a free-market think tank, focusing on transportation and infrastructure.
“At least what they are doing is trying to address an actual problem, unlike many California solutions that are just simply trying to do something without actually addressing the underlying problem,” Zaiac said.
California’s isolated efforts to cut emissions likely won’t have a noticeable effect on global emissions. Drastically cutting the amount of carbon-based fuel burned for transportation in California “will just lower the price of fuel everywhere else in the world and may or may not actually decrease the amount of carbon,” Zaiac said.
“That could cause more road damage that needs more construction, and more construction causes more congestion,” Zaiac said. “So any transition to electric vehicles that requires a large amount of new construction would cause more congestion, at least through the decade-or-so-long transition period.”
“Realistically, this means that much of the burden of this will just fall on commuter taxpayers” in the form of a new type of gas tax that can be applied to electric-vehicle travel, Zaiac said.
“This will just put further strain on municipalities that simply have not prepared and saved to buy new buses right now,” Zaiac said. “They have already-made units, and those last a long time.”
Also seen in
