North Carolina has just decided to end its tailpipe-emissions testing. Good idea, bad execution.
As numerous environmental analysts and public policy organizations have noted, programs that require most cars and light trucks to undergo annual emissions testing are costly, poorly targeted, and unlikely to generate significant environmental benefits. Environmental scientist Kenneth Green, for example, has written for the Reason Public Policy Institute that because a small number of poorly maintained, and often older, cars generate a disproportionate share of the pollution linked to mobile sources, states should put their emphasis on detecting and repairing or replacing these vehicles.
Instead, North Carolina and others have used a blunderbuss approach, testing millions of cars that are highly unlikely ever to fail. These tests jack up the price of annual safety inspections, creating some business for garages and testing sites. But they don’t provide much of a boost to air quality.
So here’s the good news. North Carolina is poised to become the first state in the Southeast to put an end to its traditional tailpipe-testing regime. The bad news is that it is replacing the system not with a targeted plan, using remote sensing and other means of screening for the likely perpetrators, but a new high-tech, computer-based system that won’t be available for cars made before 1996.
As a result, these older vehicles will now go untested. Environmentalists are complaining that this will leave the foulest-polluting cars on the road. On this one, they’re right. This new policy appears to be precisely the reverse of the correct policy, if the goal is to generate the greatest possible gains in air quality at the most efficient cost. Not all categories of older cars contribute disproportionately to smog, but the cars that contribute most to smog are disproportionately older cars. It is foolish to embrace a new testing regime that leaves them out. Moreover, we will now be more aggressively (and expensively) testing brand-new cars that, due to the engineering innovations of the past couple of decades, burn gasoline cleanly. If only these cars were on the road, the modest urban-ozone problems in North Carolina – and they are modest, despite what you may have heard or read – would recede over time, with or without testing.
These are empirical matters over which there can perhaps be some debate, but not a lot. We’ve been wasting time and money on the current emissions tests. The new round promises to be even more wasteful. Unfortunately, the political reality is that elected officials feel little incentive to get these policies right – they won’t get credit from the public, while the environmental extremists will cry foul and get largely uncritical coverage. Most North Carolinians today probably believe that our air quality is worsening because of growth and more autos on the road, and are primed to accept new regulations to address the problem. This is false. The facts are that air quality isn’t getting worse, that in many ways it’s been getting better for a long time, and that new automobiles are highly unlikely to fail any emissions test unless they are heavily used delivery trucks – which, it turns out, is fairly easily checked at the DMV.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.