Richard Hertz reporting. (Special to The New York Review)

In an effort to curb fossil fuel pollution, yesterday morning, California Governor Jerry Brown banned most cars and ordered the use of animals for all transportation in and through the state’s capital city.

“I hereby ban all vehicles that use any petroleum products in and throughout the city of Sacramento. I order that only horses and mules are to be used for any type of transportation.”

The ‘Mister Ed Law’ as it is now being called, is being tested in Sacramento only, however insiders believe this is just the first step before the governor rolls out a permanent state-wide ban.

Yesterday, environmentalists celebrated and claimed victory in their war against climate-change. However today, their euphoria has dampened, for it seems environmentalists and animal-rights advocates are now found to be at odds with each other. The new law is designed to eliminate pollution, but there is strong disagreement between the two groups because as the animal-rights activists claim, the non-polluting horses are “being forced into cruel service.”

One animal-rights representative told me that the benefits of eliminating polluting vehicles is being “drowned in the tears of the beautiful and thoughtful Paliminos.”  He went on to say that they (the horses) are being abused as “equine slaves to the forever-enslaving white man.” In addition, along the freeway this morning, I saw one stark-naked animal-rights protester holding a sign that read:

“Bite Me Governor Horse-Sh*t.”

A showdown is expected today on the grounds of the state capitol building in downtown Sacramento, where both sides are expected to be declaring their disgust with each other. In many cases, the advocates of the governor’s vehicle ban are actually at odds with even themselves, being both longtime PETA members as well as anti-fossil-fuel advocates.

One man who refused to be identified, has been open about seeking therapy over his personal conundrum.

I find myself staring in the mirror. It’s been painful and frankly quite an eye-opener. This morning I screamed at myself, “Listen up horsey-boy, maybe this is why you keep losing freaking elections!”  In that moment I actually understood what has been preventing us liberals from moving forward.

Electric cars are exempted from the ban, however their owners aren’t pleased with the plan either. Their complaint is that their non-polluting cars aren’t allowed to pass the slower animals. One electric car user had this to say:

This morning driving the Tesla was practically useless because nothing was moving faster than the damned horses. I was waiting to exit off the 5 freeway but was dead-stopped in a long backup. It seems one of the horses was afraid of the blinking traffic light and refused to pass through the off-ramp intersection. They brought in two animal psychologists but those two got in an argument also, because the first one was trying to coax the horse along with frowned-upon non-organically grown carrots.

I sought to seek some comments on the quagmire from some citizens of Los Angeles, but this proved fruitless.  All of the Los Angelenos I interviewed seemed to be completely unaware that the city of Sacramento was actually their state capital, and only one of them knew approximately where the city was located. “It’s somewhere up there by San Francisco, right?” she said.

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**** (Gentle reader, in case you haven’t already figured it out—this is satire.)