HEADLINE: Hamilton County commissioners vote to continue testing auto emissions
THE RECAP: Hamilton County commissioners voted 7-2 on Wednesday to renew a contract with the state of Tennessee to continue testing emissions in the county.
DREW’S VIEW: Only six of Tennessee’s 95 counties require emissions testing. Apparently county officials in the state’s other 89 counties are bright enough to realize that emissions testing is a senseless hassle that does almost nothing to reduce pollution.
Shelling out $10 to wait in line to run your car through an emissions test would be bad enough if it actually helped the environment. But it doesn’t. A 2007 Georgia Tech research paper points out that numerous empirical studies find no difference in emission rates between areas that require emission inspection and maintenance and those that don’t.
The reasons emissions testing doesn’t work are numerous, but one factor is that auto emissions don’t stay locked in the county where they are produced. The pollutants drift and travel over county and state lines. (This fact is obvious to most 9-year-olds, but apparently not to Hamilton County Commissioners.) As a result, Hamilton County’s air contains pollution from counties and states that don’t have the same stringent — and useless — emissions testing.