对电动汽车征税?肯定不是!

Georgia, my home state, recently passedHB170, the Transportation Funding Act of 2015. The bill, signed by Gov. Nathan Deal in May, took effect July 1, creating new sources of funding for road and bridge repairs. Georgia motorists now pay a 26-cent-per-gallon excise tax at the pump.

像大多数states, Georgia’stransportation infrastructure是一个热门一团糟。我们的道路和桥梁都需要立即关注，我首先称赞我们的民选官员是一反常态勇敢，因为较高的燃料费用精神上准备一个漂亮的积极态度。

I quickly became disillusioned, however, when I learned about one of the new sources of funding specified in the law.

Not only does the measure remove the state’s $5,000 tax credit for zero-emission vehicles, it creates a new annual alternative fuelvehicle feefor all vehicles that operate solely on electricity, as well as all plug-in hybrid electric or flex fuel vehicles registered with an alternative fuel vehicle license plate (allowing them to legally drive in Atlanta’s HOV lanes).

When Georgia EV and (some) flex fuel owners go to renew their tags, they’ll be slapped with a $200 fee, in addition to any other tag fees or ad valorem taxes they owe.

在回答我对此事不高兴电子邮件，众议员查Hufstetler写道，虽然他并没有为HB170投票（他缺席的那一天），他可以摆脱对多数人的逻辑的一些情况。

“Since gasoline taxes are paying for the maintenance of our highways, alternative vehicle owners are not paying anything towards the maintenance of the roads," he wrote. "Therefore, they felt that a fee equal to that should be assessed on these vehicles.”

Really?!

The economics of alt-fuel vehicles

Because EV drivers aren’t paying their fair share at the pump, the logic on display in the Georgia rule allows that they should be slapped with a fine calculated on the assumption that they drive an average of 24,000 miles each year (more than double thenational average).

Beyond that, let’s completely ignore the reason for the state’s EV tax credit when it was passed in 1998: metro Atlanta had been in违反了联邦空气质量标准二十年。我们需要的人购买这些更昂贵的汽车，因为我们在臭氧迅速扩大的孔仰视。

Now, after 17 years, with one of the most generous EV credits in the nation, metro Atlanta has thehighest U.S. market sharefor plug-in vehicles — but not for long. A local Nissan dealer wasquotedin the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying that he expected “a 70 percent decline in Leaf sales after the new law takes effect.”

So Georgia is choosing infrastructure over clean air — or is it?

Even with more EVs on the road, Atlanta stilldoesn’t meet the federal standardsfor ozone and fine particulate matter. And while traffic is definitely a leading culprit, natural weather conditions (it’s currently hotter than blazes here), geography (can you say sprawl?), industries and power plants also play a role.

And what powers GA’s EVs? Well, coal is still one of the primary sources of electricity generated in Georgia.

Because of this, the environmental impact of EVs has been receiving more scrutiny. A recent nationalstudy, published by a group of economists, compared gasoline tailpipe to electricity generation emissions at the county level, and found that gasoline cars likely cause less environmental harm than electric vehicles in many parts of the country.

In fact, their research shows that when all damages are considered, only 12 states warrant a subsidy rather than a tax.

That’s a shocking pronouncement. But enacting an EV tax in all of those states because of their current electric generation portfolio would be incredibly short-sighted.

Utilities such as公爵andConsumers Energy正在积极拆除了燃煤电厂，与（主要）天然气发电取代它们。Georgia Powerhas been aggressively developing utility scale solar and has just launched a solar sales and installation service for its customers to encourage more distributed solar generation.

Electricity generation is changing, and we shouldn’t let a short-term mentality (“we need more infrastructure funding”) create disincentives for electric vehicles (or other sustainable products or initiatives), which should be part of the long-term solution.