The California Legislature is an interesting study in contradictions.

On the one hand, it is capable of setting genuinely high-minded goals and mapping out the route to a better world. At the same time, it is forever trying to reach those goals on somebody’s back, and frankly that’s a difficult trait to admire.

Take, for example, the plethora of new laws that are set to take effect in 2008. Many of them are welcome, indeed. The picture of a teenage driver tooling down the street at the helm of a 4,000-pound machine while sending and receiving text messages is frightening enough to make one cheer a new law that will outlaw the use of text messaging devices, and several other communications paraphernalia, while driving.

 

Mind you, it’s not everyone who is prohibited driving under the influence of electronics, just teens. But it’s a step in the right direction, especially when you consider how few older-than-teens do that sort of thing.

It’s also about to become illegal to smoke in a vehicle in which a child is riding. That, too, is probably a good idea, given the effect tobacco smoke can have on juvenile lungs and brains.

The legislature also thought 2008 would be a good year for the state to look into a weights and measures problem that has had a cumulative impact on California consumers since the first gas stations opened in the Golden West.

 

The problem is this: in spite of what everybody thinks, nobody buys gasoline for its ability to fill the tank. Gasoline isn’t really the end product; what we really buy is energy, and the energy we buy is stored in the gasoline. But what if the energy density of the gasoline sold at the pump changes from day to day? It does, you know. In fact, it changes from hour to hour.

The problem is that gasoline swells up when it warms up. Fill your gas tank with 10 gallons from the pump at 3 p.m. on a hot day, park it at the gas station, and you’ll discover if you return to collect it at 3 a.m. that it has measurably less than 10 gallons in the tank. You’ve been robbed, because the energy content is the same, so you paid more for the energy content because you bought it during the hot part of the day from a pump that can’t tell the difference between hot and cold gas.

 

The legislature, ever sensitive to the wailings of a public tired of feeling gouged by the petroleum industry, ordered the state to study this problem and try to find a fix. The measure is called AB 868. Will it make a difference? Who knows? But the legislature should be applauded for trying to level the playing field between consumers and purveyors.

Similarly, a measure called SB 118 is an attempt to attack the problem of industry and consumer intransigence in dealing with air pollution and global warming issues by expanding the state’s involvement in research into alternative fuels. Alternative, in this case, means ‘not gasoline.’

The goal is pristine: let’s have cleaner air, and let’s reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming. But, as is often the case, the devil is in the details.

 

In the case of SB 118, the details are these – a fee is to be imposed on owners of cars when they register them with the DMV. Eleven bucks is the price of research into cleaner air.

But there’s more. It’s not just car owners, it’s particular car owners who have to pay this fee. Specifically, it is the owners of cars 6 years of age or younger. In other words, the people who buy the cleanest running cars get to pay for the research to resolve the issue of all that pollution created by older, less efficient cars and trucks being driven by someone else.

There are more than 20 million cars in California. Imposing the fee on each and every one of them might raise just as much money for research at a cost to each automobile owner of about $3.

So, why pick on new-car owners? Maybe the legislature thinks we won’t notice.

 

That’ll be 2 cents, please.