You can have Congress vote on ONE environmental law, what is it?

If you could suggest one, straighforward law concerning the environment and have Congress vote to either reject it or approve it as law, what would you propose? You don't need to present a fully edited and cited, mulitple page bill for consideration, just present us the meat of the idea.

I don't think it'd be sensible to, say, 'reguire that all US electrical power generation be from non-fossil fuel use', because such a bill would pretty clearly be resoundingly shot down. Then agian, maybe you just want the suggestion to be put out there.


So for my part, I think that I would want to have a bill that requires a federal mimimum "mileage per gallon" on all new US vehicles.


This would reduce CO2 emissions from cars. As it is, there is no regular on CO2, there is emissions regulation for pollutants, but CO2, being a natural gas, isn't technically considered a pollutant. A large proprotion but not the majority though, of US CO2 emissions are from people's vehicles. I THINK that factories and the like ARE regulated for their CO2 emissions (heck I might be wrong about that), so I don't think that more cutback on that will give us the biggest reduction, I think that rather, its better to have a good cutback on a source that isn't really regulated, cars.

By forcing there to be a high MPG rating for every car, it'd also reduce our oil consumption, which I think would be good for US foreign policy. It would also push the market and industry to make cheaper, more effiecient, electrical and other alternative engines, at least if it works out that this results in more hybrid cars.

A possible problem with this is, what if they all switch to electric cars? Electric cars don't significantly reduce pollution. They have zero emissions, but their electrical energy is generated at a power plant that burns fossil fuels.
I don't think that this is much of a problem, since you'd have to build a fantastically large number of new factories, and it'd be easiest to comply with the regulation and sell the cars by using hybrids.


Any criticism of this idea?
Any potential laws of your own?