How many times have you heard one environmental benefit or other described as being the equivalent of taking X number of cars off the road?

After you've heard it for the umpteenth time, you start to wonder if that's the real plan: to simply remove cars from the road. Well, wonderers -- you're right. In Beijing, that is the plan.

As George Bush puts it so well, it's just easier in a dictatorship!

Once driving restrictions were lifted after the Olympic Games, air pollution levels zoomed right back up past dangerous levels, from 26 two weeks ago to 104 last week. The World Health Organization says a level of 50 micrograms per square meter is dangerous.

So Beijing simply put its big, authoritarian foot down. On Mondays, cars with license plates ending in 1 and 6: off the road! Tuesday? 2 and 7. Starting Oct. 11, roughly a fifth of the city's cars will be thus forcibly removed from the roads on weekdays.

And there's more. The government also hiked gas prices 8 percent, said it will add an entire new New York City-sized subway line each year, will double the cost of...no, scratch that, quintuple the cost of downtown parking and simply prevent anybody at all from registering any new vehicle. Well, not absolutely everybody, just 75 percent of them. These are benevolent dictators.

To compensate understandably irate drivers, restricted vehicles will get a break on paying vehicle tax and road maintenance fee for one month a year. Except drivers who break the rules, of course.

After seeing what Americans go through decade after decade, attempting to pass the most pathetically incremental improvements in climate legislation, I can see the charm of the simple decree.

But, please don't tell Rush Limbaugh. This is exactly his worst fear: enviro-nazis.

Via Treehugger