That’s a title that I would generally use sarcastically, but every once in a while we come up with a really great idea:

In the largest experiment of its kind in California, the South Coast Air Quality Management District plans to use remote sensors and video cameras to measure air pollution from 1 million vehicles as they enter freeways and navigate roads in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside.

If caught, the owners of the most environmentally offensive cars and trucks would receive letters informing them that the government would pay to fix or scrap their vehicles. The South Coast district estimates that 10,000 to 20,000 of the dirtiest vehicles would be detected. Smog regulators lack the authority to order drivers to dump dirty cars, but they can offer incentives.

In an era of government initiatives that I hate to support, it’s programs like this make me feel good about paying my taxes. Granted, it starts off sounding a little Orwellian with the secret remote sensors (the article later notes that the locations of the sensors won’t be public in order to ensure that offenders don’t simply avoid the targeted ramps). But the anti-command-and-control folks (to whom I am sometimes sympathetic) are cut off at the pass by the fact that the program isn’t regulatory in nature. Instead we’re incentivizing the retirement of some of the worst polluting vehicles on the road, and thereby eliminating a disproportionately large amount of pollution. Go go gadget economics!