As jurisdictions like California and New York move to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, one US state wants to go in the opposite direction. The Wyoming Legislature is considering a resolution calling for a phase-out of new electric vehicle sales by 2035. Senate Joint Resolution 4, introduced on Friday, is supported by members of the state’s House of Representatives and Senate.
In the proposed resolution, a group of lawmakers led by Senator Jim Anderson says Wyoming’s “proud and cherished” oil and gas industry has created “countless” jobs and generated revenue for the state coffers. They add that a lack of charging infrastructure in Wyoming would make widespread EV deployment “unfeasible” and that the state would need to build “massive amounts of new power generation” to “sustain the EV mishap.”
SJ4 is calling on residents and businesses to voluntarily limit the sale and purchase of electric vehicles, with a goal of phasing them out completely by 2035. If adopted, the resolution would be purely symbolic. In fact, it’s more about sending a message to EV advocates than banning the vehicles altogether. To this point, the final section of SJ4 requests the Wyoming Secretary of State to send copies of the resolution to President Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“You might even say tongue-in-cheek, but obviously it’s a very serious issue that deserves public discussion,” Senator Boner, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told Cowboy State Daily. “I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some people want to the so-called climate crisis are actually workable in real life. I just don’t like it when other states try to force technologies that aren’t ready yet.”
While the resolution bears the hallmarks of a political stunt, it alludes to real economic concerns. Wyoming produced 85.43 million barrels of oil in 2021, making it the country’s eighth-biggest crude oil producer that year. The state’s Carbon County is also home to one of the largest wind farms in the United States. Something that isn’t talked about enough in relation to climate change is how the world is transitioning to a zero-emission economy in an equitable way. People in many rural US states are rightly suspicious of so-called green technologies because they haven’t benefited as much from recent technological changes as their urban counterparts. Take the advent of the Internet for example. In 2018, Microsoft found that many rural communities lack access to broadband internet. This has contributed to reducing the economic opportunities in these places.