When the legislation first surfaced, the auto industry and its allies unleashed a thunderous campaign against it. It would, the opponents said, lead to higher gasoline taxes, perhaps extra taxes on cars deemed to be gas guzzlers and/or the banning of certain low-mileage cars such as sports-utility vehicles.
The campaign stalled the bill in the Assembly, and eventually its author, Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, and its sponsors inserted a bunch of language purporting to guard against the dire consequences the opponents predicted, thereby providing enough political cover to gain the required votes.
Those insertions, however, raise this question: If the Air Resources Board could not tax cars or gasoline, ban certain vehicles and so forth, how could it significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions? The new law's backers -- including Davis, one assumes -- must therefore make two contradictory, perhaps mutually exclusive, arguments at the same time: that it will have a serious impact on greenhouse gases and that it won't disrupt Californians' lifestyles.
We won't know anything concrete anytime soon, because the board is given until 2005 to develop the rules, which could not take effect until the 2009 auto model year. By the way, California produces something less than 1 percent of the globe's greenhouse-gas output, so even a complete cessation of such emissions in the state would have no material impact on global warming, even if one accepts it as a scientific fact.