Westneat: Gas car ban ‘crazy, fringe bill’ no longer

Through a group he heads called Coltura, Metz has been relentlessly agitating behind the scenes that efforts to combat climate change with things like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade plans may be too complex and confusing to the public. His notion for what to do about fossil-fuel powered cars, borrowed from other countries like Norway, is simple enough to print on a T-shirt: Just get rid of them.

It’s the kind of plan that will earn you a headline at the right-wing Drudge Report. Followed by mass online mockery — which is what happened to Metz a few years ago. But now it has led to real legislation to do the previously unthinkable: Ban gas cars.

Last month in Olympia, 10 legislators introduced a bill to ban the sale or registration of any new gas-powered passenger or light-duty trucks, starting 10 years from now, in 2030. The measure would exempt emergency response vehicles and anything weighing more than 10,000 pounds, such as farm equipment. People could also keep driving and reselling gas-engine cars that are already in use as of 2030.

The point, Metz says, is to start forcing a transition away from gasoline, potentially eliminating the largest single contributor of carbon emissions.

The proposal, House Bill 2515, is a heavy lift for a short session. But notably it has been co-sponsored by seven different chairs of House committees — including the green committee, Energy and Environment; the money committee, Finance; and the economy committee, Innovation, Technology and Economic Development. “Ending our love affair with gasoline has gone mainstream,” Metz says.

The prime sponsor, Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, said when she first floated the idea a year ago, she mostly got back the wide-eyed look. “People would say ‘oh my goodness that’s so big and radical, we can’t talk about that right now,’ ” she said. “It was in the fringe crazy bill category.”

Metz insists that as crazy as banning gas cars has always sounded, it’s one of those cultural changes that, once it happens, we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

I asked Metz what else he’s working on. The answer: An ordinance to ban the development of any new gas stations in Seattle.

You can’t do that, we’re still driving gas cars, it’s crazy, I started to say. But I’ve learned my lesson with Seattle and its windmill tilters. So you can expect to see that proposal rolled out later this year.