As much as I believe a gas/oil tax would provide many benefits, I also recognize that it won't happen. On September 12, 2001, we as a nation focused our attention on a single purpose. We were as receptive as we ever would be to sacrifice and radical changes in order to track down the killers behind September 11th. Gas prices were above the historical lows of the 1990s
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, but nobody considered them painful. Even if they had, the surge of anger and determination following these attacks would have made us all willing. Had Bush proposed such a tax and explained its benefits, Americans would have embraced it, as it would have given the average American a real and meaningful way to contribute.
Instead, nearly 5 years of governmental incompetence and malfeasance have destroyed any semblance of national consensus. The last few years of gasoline price increases have made people fearful of future increases. Raising gas prices from $3/gallon freaks people out while doing it from a base of $1.30/gallon (October 2001) would have been perfectly fine. Even if gas prices decline to those levels again
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, they would have to remain low for an impossibly long time before people would be willing to raise the taxes
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.
People are just too skittish about gasoline prices, and they won't soon forget. They don't realize that the era of cheap oil is permanently over. They're too attached too their past lifestyle, unwilling to accept that it is gone forever. We had the opportunity to address this problem without too much pain, so we could meet an inevitable future on our own terms, and even postpone it. Instead, Bush and Congress blew a singular opportunity to create a smooth transition and kill several birds with a single stone. The future is still coming, but now we will be dragged forward kicking and screaming.
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I paid under $0.80/gallon at least once in Houston.
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Which they wouldn't, because they wouldn't see the need for it. There's a tiny window between when the fear passes and when the awareness of the need dissipates.
"GM on Tuesday announced a promotion that caps gas at $1.99 a gallon for
one year for buyers of certain full-size sport-utility vehicles and
midsize cars in California and Florida.
Consumers will receive a monthly credit to a pre-paid fuel card for the
difference between $1.99 and the average price of premium gas in their
state."
Over 10,000 miles in a year for a 16 mpg SUV with an average $1/gallon subsidy, that works out to be $625 paid out by GM, which doesn't have the money, the buyer would have to fork over $1250 for the rest, which is more than they'd pay without a subsidy in a sensible car. That's without counting the premium just for buying a full-sized SUV in the first place, as well as the remaining life of the vehicle after the first year. GM is stupid to do this, and anyone swayed by this is even more so.
The perfect quote was provided by a Sierra Club director: "I have never heard of an addict getting off their addiction by having someone subsidize their fix."
A ballot measure in California proposes to tax oil production. As you well know, I think a tax on oil would be a good thing, but I meant on consumption. Taxing production is a stupid idea. California is not a swing producer, so taxing oil production in that state will do nothing except to drive oil producers out of the state. Californians will pay higher prices to have more oil imported from out of state, which will certainly reduce consumption, but would that benefit be enough to make up for the loss to the economy of oil production?
The problem is that this tax implies that oil production is the problem. It's not. Consumption is the problem. By its very nature, a tax discourages the activity that incurs it. If California could significantly affect the domestic or global oil supply and thus constraint consumption, this tax might make sense, but they can't. All they can affect is consumption in state. You can import oil from other states and countries, but nobody is going to drive to Nevada or Mexico to buy gas.
In the end, California is going to have a well-meaning bill that achieves nothing positive beyond a short-term and relatively small boost to state revenue, while incurring costs to the economy from overhead and driving out businesses. Some demagogues will make political hay, demonizing the oil industry for feeding Californians' oil addiction, and looking like they're taking strong action, even as they avoid facing the hard truth and doing the right thing.
I wonder what global travel will be like in a post-oil future. Will gas-guzzling airplanes be replaced by more sedate, fuel-cell powered Zeppelins riding the jet stream to go from New York to London in a day? Maybe inter-continental voyagers will rediscover the romance of ocean liners, this time on nuclear-powered hydrofoils running from Sydney to Tokyo at 150 knots. Or there will be a bullet train from Tokyo to Los Angeles, skipping along the edge of the Pacific up Russia and over the Aleutians and down the West Coast. Or maybe we'll just learn to enjoy staying home, keeping in touch with fancy-schmancy video-conferencing and exploring with virtual reality, gobbling up the gigabytes, gigahertz, and gigawatts.
A week or so back, The Christian Science Monitor reported:
Today's conventional hybrids command a premium price - $2,000 to $4,000 more than their nonhybrid counterparts - and their owners will recover that extra cost in about three years, assuming $3-a-gallon gasoline and 12,000 miles a year of driving, the report found.
Those numbers sounded suspicious to me, especially after I did the math myself, so I obtained the original report (bug ye not). What it actually says is (on page 15 of the PDF, page 9 of the report):
With a gasoline price of $3 per gallon, fuel for a 30-mile-per-gallon conventional vehicle driven 12,000 miles costs $1,200. A hybrid achieving 50 miles per gallon and driven the same amount uses $720 per year on gasoline.... the ... payback period for the hybrid relative to the conventional vehicle is just over seven years.
Seven years now? Wow. That's a big disparity. How did they screw that up? Simple. Reading further down the page, it says:
With battry costs at the long-term levels in Table 1, however, the picture is quite different. Assume that ... incremental costs for ... a hybrid relative to a conventional vehicle are $1,500, declining to $1,000 ion the long term... which assumes high-volume battery costs of $400 for the hybrid.... results in [a] payback period of 2.9 years.
The "long-term levels" they refer to are the cost of batteries if they are produced in much higher quantities than today. The CSM reporter took completely hypothetical cost and rate-of-return estimates and presented them as facts.
My point here isn't so much about the efficiency of hybrids as it is about bad reporting. The mistake was instantly obvious to me, and it took barely any time to prove it (most of the time was spent creating a fake account for the ACEEE site). And yet, a key fact presented in the article was still wrong and made press not only in the CSM, but as a reprint in Yahoo News and possibly other publications.
The moral is to find the primary sources when you can. Of course, the media enjoy too much their role as mediators to make that easy. Given how often they make mistakes, though, it's kind of necessary. I think this is part of why people feel disillusioned with scientists. A paper will appear in a journal describing how daily injections of a particular substance into a genetically-modified strain of mice caused tumors of the spleen to spontaneously reduce in size 38% of the time, which will turn into the headline "Cancer Cure Discovered!" This will happen in politics, too, where a bill that grants the President the power to arbitrarily detain and torture anyone he wants is called a "compromise." But I've posted enough about that subject for now, so I'll stop.
Have you noticed how car rental companies assume that a rental car customer will always prefer the larger vehicle? For one thing, they cost more. For another, if you reserve a compact car, and they don't have one available, they'll give you larger vehicle, even a large SUV. Never mind that they're harder to drive and burn more gas. I don't blame the rental companies; I think this reflects the preferences of their customer base. Our wasteful ways are subtle and pervasive.