If you think that man-made climate change is a serious problem, then you will naturally support Colorado Governor Jared Polis's greenhouse gas reduction roadmap. But if you really believe that man-made climate change is a serious problem, then you have no way to support this plan, because the transportation part will at least cost Colorado people a huge amount of money, but it has almost no effect on greenhouse gases.

The plan calls for a 10% reduction in total driving volume by 2030. Colorado's population increased by 15% between 2010 and 2020, and may increase by 15% by 2030, which means that the plan does require a 25% reduction in driving per capita.

There is only one time in American history that per capita driving was reduced by 25%: World War II, from 1941 to 1943, natural gas rations reduced driving per capita by 39%. Otherwise, the reduction will be small. The false energy crisis of the 1970s reduced driving by 2.5% in 1974 and 1% in 1979. The 2008 financial crisis reduced driving by up to 2.6%.

So, will Colorado introduce a natural gas rationing system? No, as stated in a document from the Colorado Department of Transportation, the plan calls for outdated solutions that have never worked in the past: traffic improvements, bike lanes, and compact development. The only difference is that they will now be implemented with new enthusiasm from the Save the Earth movement.

Between 2000 and 2019, Denver spent more than $8 billion on transportation improvements. In 2000, 4.794% of workers in the Denver area used public transportation to get to work. In 2019, the share of public transport was almost the same at 4.788%. At best, spending 8 billion US dollars may reduce the loss of public transportation’s share of commuters, but it will certainly not lead to a reduction in per capita driving.

We know that people living in compact development drive less, but we don’t know how many of them are due to self-selection, that is, people who want to reduce their driving choose to live in compact development. But we also know that more compact development will cause more congestion and waste fuel, so people living in compact development actually generate more greenhouse gases due to lower driving levels than people living in low-density areas.

Bike path? Give me a break. Less than 1% of commuters in the Denver area ride bicycles to work, which is not surprising considering the hot summers and snowy winters in the area. Portland, which has a much milder climate, built bicycle lanes throughout the city and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build bicycle and light rail bridges across the Willamette River. In 2014, 3.0% of commuters in Portland and 7.6% of commuters in Portland went to work by bicycle, the highest among major cities/urban areas in the United States. But they cannot sustain it: by 2019, the share of bicycles in the region has fallen to 2%, and in cities it has fallen to 5.2%.

In short, any plan that proposes improved traffic, bicycle routes, and compact development to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will not work. But this is not all that the Colorado plan requires. It also proposes to encourage electric vehicles, but most of Colorado's electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, so switching to electric vehicles will only transfer emissions to different parts of the state.

Of course, the governor's plan also calls for reducing the use of these fossil fuels for power generation by 80%. But it doesn't take into account the extra electricity that must be generated to support all the electric cars he wants people to buy.

In our five decades of trying to reduce air pollution caused by cars, one of the successful strategies has been to make petroleum-powered cars that pollute less. The Colorado plan completely ignored this strategy.

This is why I am skeptical of man-made climate change. Its true believers have decided what we must be forced to do to solve this problem, and their plan happens to be something they raised long before climate change became a problem. If they really believe that climate change is a problem, they will not come up with solutions that we already know will not work.

Randal O'Toole is a senior researcher at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and the director of transportation policy at the Denver Independent Institute, a free market think tank. This version originally appeared in his blog The Antiplanner.

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