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Lawmakers from the country’s least populous state are taking a bold stand against modernity and climate action. They are sponsoring SJ0004, “Phase Out Sales of New Electric Vehicles by 2035,” a straightforward bill that expresses the state’s goal to phase out sales of new electric vehicles by 2035 and asks Wyoming’s industries and citizens to fulfill their civic duty by opposing the electric car. Copies of the resolution would be sent to the White House, congressional leaders and the governor of California.
The motivation, according to the bill’s preamble, is that the oil and gas industry is important to the state, a state with fewer than 600,000 residents. Wyoming prides itself on its oil and gas industry, and that gas — presumably meaning “gasoline” here and not the natural gas referred to in the first sentences of the bill — powers vehicles that travel the state’s sprawling highways.
The authors of the bill find Wyoming’s interstate network too desolate for electric vehicles, especially because there is no existing electric vehicle charging infrastructure, they argue.
The authors also decry the fact that EVs require certain critical minerals – not currently supplied by the state of Wyoming – and that these could end up in polluting Wyoming landfills, in clear ignorance of the huge recycling potential for EV batteries.
To protect the incomes of people who make money extracting or moving hydrocarbons around the state, sales of new electric vehicles in Wyoming must be banned by 2035, the bill states.
The date is no coincidence; 2035 is the year in which California plans to phase out sales of new combustion engine vehicles. And that same year, US President Joe Biden wants at least 50 percent of all new vehicles sold in the US to be electric vehicles.
Sounds like projection to me
The politics of resentment is loud and clear from the bill’s lead sponsor, Senator Jim Anderson. Anderson told the Cowboy State Daily that if successful, the Wyoming legislature would inform the rest of the world that “if you don’t like our petroleum cars, we don’t like your electric cars.”
But even if the bill passes — not impossible, given the tight Republican control of both chambers of the Wyoming legislature — it won’t commit the state to any action other than a general sense of libel toward battery-powered cars.
Indeed, the Cowboy State Daily quotes Senator Brian Boner, another politician behind the bill, as saying that some might describe the bill as “tongue-in-cheek, but it’s clearly a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion.”
