Wyoming, the Petrostate 

Earlier this week, I received a text from my dad with some local sports news: the high school girls’ basketball team of my hometown, in Pinedale, Wyoming, had beaten neighboring Jackson Hole by a score of 61-5. “No this isn’t a typo,” he wrote, punctuating the last sentence with a smiling-face emoji. The text reminded me of my own high school days and the vast distances our teams would travel across Wyoming, no matter the weather, to compete. Two- to five-hour trips were not unusual; eight-hour drives were not unheard of.
 
Later that day, I learned on Twitter that Wyoming lawmakers had submitted legislation to “ban the sale of new electric vehicles by 2035.” And no, that isn’t a typo either. Wyoming is desperate to keep its fossil-fuel economy. The state produces 13 times more energy than it consumes, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and has few taxes, relying instead on royalties and other coal and gas money for the (few) public amenities it provides.
 
There are few bus or public transport options throughout its high sagebrush plains and mountain towns, so most people drive their own vehicles. The EV ban, then, is particularly cruel or short-sighted, depending on how generous you want to be with state lawmakers. Because as the world goes electric, and fewer manufacturers produce gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles, the people of Wyoming will fall farther behind, paying a hidden tax, as they so often do. This is particularly ridiculous because the geography of Wyoming is more interesting than its geology. Its mountains channel winds, “often fierce,” the EIA says, somewhat poetically, that could generate a lot of renewable energy. There’s no reason it should not aspire to a renewable grid that could support electric vehicles.
 
What are we to do with this kind of news? Not much, I suppose. The people of Wyoming will suffer, gritting their teeth and steeling themselves for the long, expensive drives ahead, and history will snicker at the naïve, greedy ideologues who wrote foolish laws. The tide will turn, and eventually Wyoming will have to catch up. It’s just a shame that it will be beaten so badly, 61-5, say, in the green revolution — a real but avoidable trouncing.

Photo of road toward the Grand Tetons, Wyoming, by Mark Gunn

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