Drivers Don’t Need a Mandate for Choice

Nicolas Loris / April 08, 2011

If a mandate for choice sounds oxymoronic, it’s because it is.  But that’s what policymakers want for our vehicle fleet.  Policymakers will convince you what they’re doing will promote markets and competition and that it will benefit the consumers.  You won’t be paying $4 per gallon and we won’t be buying foreign oil.  That’s the rhetoric you’re hearing as Congress rolls out legislation to promote natural gas vehicles.   But it is legislation that won’t help the American consumer or the American taxpayer and the reason we have less natural gas vehicles on the road today is the result of competition, not the absence of it. Consumers prefer cars and trucks that run on conventional gasoline and diesel.

The New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions of 2011, or NAT GAS Act, introduced by a bipartisan group of House Members (John Sullivan (R-OK) Dan Boren (D-OK) John Larson (D-CT) and Kevin Brady (R-TX),  would provide special tax breaks and handouts for the production and purchase of natural gas vehicles as well as refueling infrastructure. (more…)