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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

How do you think about bans vs incentives when it comes to a situation like this one? I'm generally inclined to believe that making the alternatives so much better that people feel compelled to switch is the best approach, but maybe that's unrealistic for the gas powered car domain.

Not that I have any particular affinity or love for gas powered cars in particular. It's weird to imagine that some day we might end up in a world where gas stations aren't common anymore and you need to go to the Hardware Store or some specialty shop to buy gas.

My other immediate question is: what stops people from buying a car in the next state over and driving it in? At which point this ban might be meant as more of an increased barrier rather than a full ban.

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I think bans are a pretty terrible idea. It implies that the alternatives aren't good enough. But due to the bans people will be forced to use them anyway.

It's great if you're an EV manufacturer though because you can rack up your price and customers won't have much of an alternative. Bonus points if the government also bans imports of EVs from certain other countries.

Even if this isn't the objective, it nevertheless is a way people will see the whole situation as.

> I think bans are a pretty terrible idea. It implies that the alternatives aren't good enough.

That could be true but we can't say for certain because the market is already so incredibly distorted by oil and gas subsidies.

Automobiles in general are insanely subsidized in the form of state funded road infrastructure.

There's nothing free market about transportation, especially in North America.

Could you give me a description of said subsidies? It's just that the last time I saw a serious study measuring them, the study was pretty much a study on the ways to torture the semantics of the word subsidy.

Most countries in the world also implement significant excise taxes on petroleum fuels. The American one is about 5%, while in Europe they can go to 40% excluding VAT.

Oil and gas subsidies don't exist.

A literal reading of this comment is easily falsifiable[1][2], so can you explain what you mean?

[1] <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/climate/tax-breaks-oil-ga...>

[2] a few examples under <https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/subtitle-A/chapte...>

That's absurd. Practically every industry gets some form of subsidies, and some much more than others.

You're just regurgitating some O&G spin talking point that was put out to counter a recent report that may or may not have over estimated the amount of subsidies to O&G depending on your interpretation of the statistics.

But that doesn't mean that O&G subsidies don't exist.

How do I know? My salary comes from those subsidies.

Trucks and buses are subsidised by cars

Road infrastructure applies equally to gas powered and EVs

Maybe not if you are able to charge without being taxed extra like gas is...

But not to all the other forms of transportation that don't involve roads.

> Automobiles in general are insanely subsidized in the form of state funded road infrastructure.

EVs are automobiles too, using the same roads.

Even if you're suggesting everyone should move to something non-automobile (bikes?) you still need the roads because society needs things like ambulances, fire trucks, garbage trucks, etc. You can't have a society without roads, they have existed for millenia before cars.

> It implies that the alternatives aren't good enough.

That's only true in the absence of any market failure, but in this case we have mispriced negative externalities.

EDIT: Changed "unpriced" to "mispriced", since gas taxes exist as pointed out below.

Gas taxes are a direct mechanism to price the negative externalities. Yes, gas taxes also cover road infrastructure, but the amount of gas purchased (and therefore taxed) is directly proportional to the negative externality of CO2 emissions.

> the amount of gas purchased (and therefore taxed) is directly proportional to the negative externality of CO2 emissions.

This doesn't mean the gas taxes are big enough to correct the market failure. Your comment would be true even if we multiply gas taxes by 0.01, 0.1 or 10.0.

I would prefer it if we just used properly calibrated (larger) gas taxes as the single mechanism. But voters hate that, so we're left with second best solutions.

I think the bans are due to externalities.

No. The bans are due to people not doing what the politicians think they should.

What people? Demand for EVs is high, regardless of the 2035 purchase ban.

The bans are in great part likely due to politicians trying to score points.

A far in the future ban (2035 in this case) is just an incentive for manufacturers to invest in EVs. Moreover, it will add a little bit of encouragement today for people to buy EVs. The increased demand of EVs will further make EVs more profitable vs ICVs.

Also we literally ban all sorts of technologies whenever they have negative consequences. For DDT to asbestos, to chemical-dumping in rivers, to low quality fuels, etc. This is nothing new.

Explicit bans seem so counter-productive to me when implicit bans are so easy. Why explicitly ban ICE vehicles and gas stations when sensible pollution laws would accomplish the same thing?

It's a lot harder to argue against something like NOx emission limits than ICE bans.

The ban is just going to stop you registering a gas/diesel vehicle newer than x.

So if the ban comes into effect in 2030, it will be impossible to register a gas/diesel vehicle that is a 2030 or newer in said state.

Sure, you could register a vehicle in a state or country you don't live in, but that's already illegal.

Working in software and fraud, I believe it is better to make it easier for good people to do good things than for bad people to not do bad things. think of Netflix with password sharing and how successful they have been while allowing it

I think a ban could make sense in very specific areas. I live in salt lake which has horrendous pollution problems. There are many causes for the pollution and we'll have to work through them all, but it wont be solved without pretty much getting rid of gas cars. A ban on selling gas cars specifically in the salt lake valley would show all the residents how serious we are about solving the problem, and people who really want one can still go get one somewhere else.

People complain either way so just be honest and outright ban it.

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