OPINION:
The impossible just happened. The California Legislature took a small step toward curtailing its over-the-top regulatory zeal. With a bipartisan 12-2 vote, the state Senate Transportation Committee advanced Leno’s Law, a measure that prevents stringent emissions rules from kicking classic cars off the road.
On Monday, the state Senate Appropriations Committee will hold a hearing on the bill.
Jay Leno, perhaps the country’s most famous car collector, is spearheading the movement to exempt 35-year-old automobiles from emissions testing that the vehicles were never designed to pass. He is worried that overregulation will wipe out the Golden State’s car culture.
“I watched the movie industry get decimated. Everybody moved out of California, they charged so much to film. Everyone went to Texas, Georgia, Atlanta,” Mr. Leno said at a press conference. “I don’t want to see the hot rod or mechanical industry leave California the way the film business did.”
Although most states exempt classic cars, California forces testing on anything made after 1975. Mr. Leno’s proposal would affect only a handful of the state’s 32 million cars and trucks.
Depending on where they live, millions of Americans nationwide are subjected to these inspection headaches every few years. In the Washington area, smog testing imposes an expensive and unnecessary hassle on owners of new and old cars alike, and the numbers prove it.
Smog is a byproduct of internal combustion. Decades ago, tailpipe pollution did make the air harder to breathe. Over time, however, technological advances cleansed the process and engines are now squeaky clean. Only a handful of out-of-tune jalopies ever cause any trouble.
In Virginia, less than 2% of cars ever fail testing, yet the remaining 98% are subjected to the biennial burden anyway because it’s a moneymaking boondoggle for the state and the mechanic shops that run the program.
The feds are also at fault because the Environmental Protection Agency imposes draconian conditions on major metropolitan areas that fail to meet strict National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Except the agency has already acknowledged there’s no problem here. “The entire Washington Area also continues to attain the 2008 ozone NAAQS.”
Afraid of losing their relevance, environmental bureaucrats regularly alter the standards for items such as particulate matter levels so that compliance is harder to achieve. Even so, Virginia already complies.
“On March 6, 2024, EPA issued a revised PM2.5 NAAQS, lowering the annual PM2.5 standard. … All areas of the Commonwealth are in compliance with this new standard,” state officials concluded.
Despite the clear skies, Northern Virginia is stuck on an EPA “maintenance plan” that won’t expire until 2030. This requires the Old Dominion to continue accepting terrible public policies such as high-occupancy toll roads and emissions testing, even though they have little impact on the cleanliness of the air.
The biggest air quality problem today isn’t classic cars; it’s Canadian wildfires. Mismanagement by the liberals in Ottawa allows entire forests to go up in smoke, exporting filthy clouds of soot southward.
“These forest fire-driven poor air quality days increased eight-hour ozone concentrations, daily PM2.5 concentrations, and annual PM2.5 concentrations in 2023 across the Commonwealth and especially in the northern portion of Virginia,” state officials explained.
Drivers get blamed for those dismal figures. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin just signed off on declaring the Washington area clean, but this obsolete system still needs to be revamped. The emissions testing regime serves bureaucracy, not the public.
If the Golden State admits the need for reform, so too can the rest of the nation.
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