EDITORIAL: Nevada ponders adopting another bad California idea

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but, unfortunately, the same can’t be said for what happens in California. Awful ideas born in the one-party Golden State tend to infect progressives elsewhere, including Nevada — and here comes another one.

In August, California regulators announced they would phase in through 2035 a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles. Ironically, just days later, state officials begged residents to cut their electricity usage to avoid blackouts, even asking them not to charge electric vehicles during peak hours.

Predictably, this harebrained effort to strong-arm car consumers quickly spread to other deep-blue enclaves, including New York and Washington. And now it has infiltrated the Nevada bureaucracy.

“To make continued progress toward GHG reduction goals and improving air quality while Nevada’s population continues to grow, NDEP and DMV have started a process for considering adoption of California Advanced Clean Cars 2 standards,” noted a statement from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. For those who don’t speak bureaucratese, GHG stands for “greenhouse gas.”

In fact, this move is a hubristic power grab by central planners who believe they know better than the marketplace.

Sales of cleaner vehicles are increasing but remain at low levels. Yet the major auto companies have invested billions in new green technology and product lines (also, it’s worth noting, at the point of a gun aimed from D.C.) to make electric vehicles more palatable to car buyers. Let the market — albeit one already highly manipulated by the political class — sort it out.

We’re “skeptical on things that are being forced into the marketplace that are not consumer driven,” said Tyler Corder, CFO of Findlay Automotive Group. “The vast majority are still looking for gas cars.”

Indeed, let’s slow down here. It’s not clear at this point that the United States has the grid and natural resources necessary to make this transition so quickly or that battery technology will advance rapidly enough to address the concerns — price, battery life, charging time — of many buyers. Greens and their allies in the environmental bureaucracy are free to raise the capital necessary to get into the EV businesses — the Lada comes to mind — but they seem more interested in forcing others to conform than in doing the heavy lifting.

All this was too much even for Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat. “I’m not in a position right now where I’d come up with an arbitrary date to ban fossil fuel vehicles,” he said. “That’s getting a little over our skis.” He’s right. The governor and state lawmakers should make abundantly clear to the state environmental bureaucracy that Nevada won’t embrace California’s burdensome and never-ending regulatory meddling in the auto industry.