By Mary Villareal   NEWSTARGET

Governor Jay Inslee signed a new bill that will ban all non-electric vehicles in Washington state by 2030.

Inslee said the bill will “create more efficient transportation options,” adding that transportation is the state’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and there is no way to talk about climate change without putting transportation in the conversation.

This effort is part of the $16.9 billion transportation package dubbed “Move Ahead Washington,” with an applicable section that reads: “A target is established for the state that all publicly owned and privately owned passenger and light duty vehicles of model year 2030 or later that are sold, purchased, or registered in Washington state be electric vehicles.”

The bill also calls for an “interagency electric vehicle coordinating council” that was created by the new law and directed to “complete a scoping plan for achieving the 2030 target.” The said scoping plan should be completed on or before December 31, 2023.

“This package will move us away from the transportation system our grandparents imagined and towards the transportation system our grandchildren dream of,” Inslee said.

Other inclusions within the bill are taxpayer funds for thousands of electronic vehicles charging stations throughout the state and funding for four new hybrid-electric ferries.

2030 Timeline overly ambitious

An economist from the University of Arkansas, Jeremy Horpedahl, said the 2030 timeline is “overly ambitious.” Instead, he suggested an alternative course of action to a top-down directive.

“A better approach would be to gradually encourage consumers to switch to electric vehicles and for private enterprises to build the charging infrastructure with incentives,” he said. He also added that the incentives can be positive reinforcement such as subsidies that were recently included in the Washington state budget, although at smaller prices than the governor wanted.

They could also be negative incentives like carbon taxes, which were previously proposed, but rejected by Washington voters in 2016 and 2018.

Horpedahl maintained that consumers should be nudged toward electric vehicles, and not forced into them. Whatever the ideal approach is, Horpedahl said that using economic incentives to encourage more environmentally-friendly consumption is better than strict mandates. (Related: The big electric vehicle LIE: Electric cars are not “zero emissions,” and their ecological impact is actually dirtier than diesel trucks.)

John Wilkerson, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington addressed the politics of the situation, noting that fighting climate change is Inslee’s signature issue.

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