House Bill 2262 Lowering Rolling Resistance of Tires

I stumbled into this by accident clicking through/buried in random PNW interest columns and was puzzled to see such a piece of legislation seemingly without too much scientific discussion or forethought being tabled.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in the following subject, nor am I particularly well read in them even as a layperson but at one time, I was an epidemiologist and before then did a couple degrees in civil and environmental engineering so try to abreast of what’s going on in the world with some degree of interest. Anyway, that’s my way of saying that if I’m off about something, like magnitude of effects, I’ll defer to greater expertise.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=2262

This bill seeks to improve the fuel efficiency of vehicles on the road by banning heavier, more durable tires in favor lower rolling resistance tires. Here’s the conundrum - those heavier, more durable tires also tend to have more wet traction and are cut with more tread depth. Lower rolling resistance tires are made with much more synthetic rubber and plastics. And as many of you may know, we’re just now starting to discover that we have another huge problem on hands on top of the climate change crisis cliff we’re about to go off, which the environmental microplastics/oceanic plastics problem. (I’ll wait right here while you Google that.)

TL;DR - It’s legit, 90%+ of oceanic pollution is microplastics, 75-85% of microplastics are tire dust, there are significant measurable health effects between human populations between high traffic areas attributable to microplastics, microplastics may cause/may be the cause of the ice caps to (be) melt(ing) faster than predicted due to them changing them changing the albedo (reflectivity) of the caps, among other previously unknown and unpredicted and unpredictable unknowns.

On top of this, this doesn’t seem to take into account how tire manufacturers will respond to the change in the economics of the situation. One of the things that annoys me to no end about the Democratic Party is that it seems to be the party of wishful thinking in terms of what they want the other guy to do. But as we say in the Army, The Other Guy (aka the enemy/opponent/industry/whatever) gets a vote, too. Aka, he rarely rolls over and does exactly what you want , which is why it costs $35 to get a delivery of egg rolls here in Seattle right now. Anyway, that’s another topic.

That is to say, this piece of legislature seems to have heart in the right place, but IMO, needs a little bit more study, especially in terms of its environmental impact in terms of microplastics, which is also a looming existential crisis of its own accord, so we don’t do something akin to shooting ourelves in our own foot. (Right now, great white sharks all over the world are running around terrified out of their minds because killer whales are hunting them for their livers. Ruminate on that for a minute. Apex predators don’t hunt other apex predators unless something is badly wrong with the ecosystem. Like extinction level events bad. And these orcas have developed a system for it and are teaching to other orcas. This is how we find out they have culture.

Oh yeah, king and snow crabs? We’re not seeing them on our dinner plates in our lifetimes.

So yeah, let’s legislate more microplastics for our oceans. 🖖