Dumb? Maybe. Unprecedented? No.

Over the last year or two, I've seen various stories on future proposed "internal combustion engine bans" in e.g. the European Union and California.

The specific justification, of course, is "fighting climate change" by moving from fossil fuels to electric vehicles. And there are lots of problems with that justification including whether "climate change" is a "problem" to be "solved," how the electricity is to be generated (if you're burning fossil fuels to generate the electricity, you're not reducing the emissions, you're just concentrating them in fewer locations), etc.

Naturally, there's a lot of outrage over e.g. my sacred God-given right to lay down long streaks of rubber at stoplights in my 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 with 455 motor and 4-barrel carburetor (if I still had that car, and I wish I did -- 12 mpg on the highway, 8 in town).

For some reason, when I saw such a story this morning, a question popped to mind:

When did horses/buggies get (effectively, with some exceptions) banned from American roads?

The answer, basically, is that it happened over a time frame between 1920 and 1939.

"At the turn of the nineteenth century, there were 21 million horses in the U.S. and only about 4,000 automobiles."

By 1915, though, car had overtaken horse as a transport method.

And by 1935, buggy makers were only turning out about 3,000 units per year.

Horses and carriages got increasingly just ... in the way. They were slowing down other traffic. And of course, horses shit wherever they happen to be. To read a lot of period fiction from the last 25 years or so, one might be given to believe that major city streets in the late 19th century were pretty much just swamps of horse shit mixed with sawdust spread periodically over the horse shit to reduce the horse shit odor and to help pedestrians and carriage wheels not slip and slide on the horse shit.

So, naturally, "there ought to be a law!"

Whether I agree with it or not (I don't -- the market will make it effectively happen anyway at some point), I can offer a couple of reasons other than "climate change" for a ban on internal combustion engines from the roads.

1. Air pollution effects not related to climate change per se. That is, smog and its attendant local air quality effects. In any urb of any significant size, if you're walking down the street you are breathing car exhaust. Whatever effect they might or might now have on climate change in the aggregate, it seems reasonable to move them from 300 million exhaust pipes right up in people's faces to fewer, and more remote, power plant smokestacks.
2. Noise pollution. Those 300 million motor vehicles are loud, and the loudness is dispersed, again, across every city and town. A power plant is probably noisy, too, but it's also probably a mile from the nearest homes and more miles from the nearest concentrations of homes/businesses. I happen to like traffic noise, because once we moved off the farm, I grew up about 100 yards from an interstate highway exit. For years, I had trouble going to sleep unless there was a bunch of road noise all night long. But I can see why it gets on people's nerves.

Which is all to say that there are specific respects in which the internal combustion engine versus the electric motor is not unlike the horse shitting all over the road versus the much cleaner internal combustion engine.