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Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

Norway is also tiny and SOVEREIGN. Any similarly inclined USA state must answer to the other 49.

How so? What stops any state in the US from doing similar things? Genuine question. California for example routinely establishes new and stricter (compared to other US states) environmental rules governing emissions and whatnot. Legalizing pot is similarly fairly out of the mainstream and it is being done independently by several states.

The Clean Air Act allows the federal government to give CA the ability to set alternative standards for car emission controls, but it isn't likely it allows CA to ban all fueled vehicles.

They could almost certainly make the price of gas so expensive via taxes that it effectively bans them though.

...aaaand the federal government (via congress, the executive, or the courts) could find some way to intervene and challenge that and hold it up indefinitely.

> Legalizing pot is similarly fairly out of the mainstream and it is being done independently by several states.

And for a while those states were subject to ongoing raids from the federal government. The Obama administration has held off, but the legal framework that justifies said raids is very much in place. If opinions blow back the other way they could resume any time.

When you're not sovereign, then your sovereign can tell you what you can and can't do. If you're mostly on their side, it's not a problem, but there's no guarantee it will stay that way forever.

Say a conservative supreme court comes to power and says, "Yeah, pot is totally banned and states can't opt out of it." End of discussion.

If you ban sale of gas cars in say, California, everyone will just hop over to Oregon/Nevada/Arizona to purchase vehicles.

If you ban gas stations instead in California, where will they fill up? The federal government has limited control over state land use regulation.

banning gas stations isn't a ban on new gas vehicles, it's a ban on all gas vehicles. very different, and the people will never vote for it until we are in a very different place than we are today.

California already has stricter emissions standards than most states. You can't purchase a car in Oklahoma and register it in California without making modification to the emissions system.

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