Governor Walz wants to spend $250,000 studying how to increase gas prices

Governor Tim Walz has proposed that Minnesota spend $250,000 studying his proposal to adopt California’s clean fuel standards, which will increase the cost of gasoline and fail to make any meaningful difference in future global temperatures.

The California Fuel Standard (CFS) study appears in the Governor’s proposed transportation budget, and it claims the project will address “information gaps” remaining from the previous analysis commissioned by the Walz administration that cost taxpayers $72 per hour and it omitted any discussion of the cost of the standards, as we wrote here in July 2022.

If enacted in Minnesota, an analysis by Stillwater Associates estimates the California fuel standard would increase gasoline prices by 20 cents per gallon in the near term, with costs eventually rising to 54 cents per gallon by 2035 as the regulations become more stringent over time. According to the analysis, diesel prices would eventually increase by 53 cents per gallon.

The additional costs resulting from adopting the California fuel standard in Minnesota would increase yearly costs for Minnesota families and businesses by $210 to $568 per household. Rural families, single-parent households, and new arrivals to Minnesota would be hit hardest by these steep cost increases.

Despite the high costs, American Experiment determined that even if the Walz administration successfully reduced greenhouse gas emissions from Minnesota’s transportation sector by 20 percent by 2035, it would have zero measurable impact on future global temperatures. In fact, reducing these emissions would only decrease future global temperatures by 0.0002° C by 2100, an amount so small it is impossible to measure with even the most sophisticated scientific equipment.

Rather than spending $250,000 of taxpayer dollars studying the California Fuel Standard, Governor Walz should just read our March 2022 report and return the money to the people who earned it.