Gas Tax
A Wired article about energy policy...
"If the President were serious about energy independence, he would ask us to drive less and use public transportation more. "
Me...
Sure, that's a nice thing to ask, but if that were the whole plan, I'd say that's about as not-serious about energy independence as one could be. Just asking people to be better people is not going to accomplish anything.
We need more expensive gasoline, via taxes perhaps. These taxes (but not just these taxes) should be directed to various alternatives. We should not focus on one alternative; we should develop bio fuels, hybrids, pure electric vehicles, more extensive public transportation, more extensive inter-city and inter-state rail networks. With a wide variety of robust alternatives and more expensive gasoline, market forces will cause efficiency to increase and draw the best options to the top.
The best options may not be the same in all parts of the country; public transport and medium range pure electrics are excellent for urban commuting, while bio diesel and rail are probably better for shipping and long range transportation. Hydrogen cells may never be the best option for consumer vehicles, due to hydrogen containment, volume, and transportation issues, but they should be developed and allowed to find a place in the market wherever their various strengths and weaknesses make them a viable choice, such as oceanic shipping.
Apparently, this guy agrees, chiming in with this gem:
"As N. Gregory Mankiw, the noted Harvard professor and former chairman of The Council of Economic Advisors, stated in a recent Wall Street Journal article regarding gas taxes, there is something called tax incidence taught in every freshman tax analysis course. Tax incidence states that every tax cost is shared by both producer and consumer. The short version as it applies to this situation is that as a higher gasoline tax drives down consumption, market demand will subsequently fall, forcing oil prices lower. Just like magic, the actual purchase price of gasoline would increase by less than the tax because the cost of the major ingredient would be decreasing at the same time. More beautiful magic - as a practical matter, oil producers like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and Kuwait pick up some of the cost of our increased tax gas."
Thing seems to be, this stuff is hard because we have to coordinate advances and reforms in many different areas. More electric cars will shift the energy consumption away from cars and into power plants. This is an improvement, even if that is all that happens, for a variety of reasons: power plants are more efficient due to their scale, and can be more reliably fitted with powerful emission scrubbing systems. A fully electric car has the potential to be much lighter than a petro car, and overall much cheaper and maintenance free, especially with battery advances and large-scale manufacturing operations.
But that shift away from cars is not all that will or should happen. We should also develop alternative power plants, including nuclear, which come with their own set of issues. We should address urban planning, street layout, and public transportation issues. We don't want too much centralized planning, because a centralized planner's mistake has far reaching consequences but a diverse market disregards individual failures and uses an adaptive selection process to find the most resiliant balance of various solutions to various problems, but we need policies that encourage the market to move toward the best long-term solutions. Government policies frame the problems facing the market in ways that make one or another set of strategies attractive.
"If the President were serious about energy independence, he would ask us to drive less and use public transportation more. "
Me...
Sure, that's a nice thing to ask, but if that were the whole plan, I'd say that's about as not-serious about energy independence as one could be. Just asking people to be better people is not going to accomplish anything.
We need more expensive gasoline, via taxes perhaps. These taxes (but not just these taxes) should be directed to various alternatives. We should not focus on one alternative; we should develop bio fuels, hybrids, pure electric vehicles, more extensive public transportation, more extensive inter-city and inter-state rail networks. With a wide variety of robust alternatives and more expensive gasoline, market forces will cause efficiency to increase and draw the best options to the top.
The best options may not be the same in all parts of the country; public transport and medium range pure electrics are excellent for urban commuting, while bio diesel and rail are probably better for shipping and long range transportation. Hydrogen cells may never be the best option for consumer vehicles, due to hydrogen containment, volume, and transportation issues, but they should be developed and allowed to find a place in the market wherever their various strengths and weaknesses make them a viable choice, such as oceanic shipping.
Apparently, this guy agrees, chiming in with this gem:
"As N. Gregory Mankiw, the noted Harvard professor and former chairman of The Council of Economic Advisors, stated in a recent Wall Street Journal article regarding gas taxes, there is something called tax incidence taught in every freshman tax analysis course. Tax incidence states that every tax cost is shared by both producer and consumer. The short version as it applies to this situation is that as a higher gasoline tax drives down consumption, market demand will subsequently fall, forcing oil prices lower. Just like magic, the actual purchase price of gasoline would increase by less than the tax because the cost of the major ingredient would be decreasing at the same time. More beautiful magic - as a practical matter, oil producers like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and Kuwait pick up some of the cost of our increased tax gas."
Thing seems to be, this stuff is hard because we have to coordinate advances and reforms in many different areas. More electric cars will shift the energy consumption away from cars and into power plants. This is an improvement, even if that is all that happens, for a variety of reasons: power plants are more efficient due to their scale, and can be more reliably fitted with powerful emission scrubbing systems. A fully electric car has the potential to be much lighter than a petro car, and overall much cheaper and maintenance free, especially with battery advances and large-scale manufacturing operations.
But that shift away from cars is not all that will or should happen. We should also develop alternative power plants, including nuclear, which come with their own set of issues. We should address urban planning, street layout, and public transportation issues. We don't want too much centralized planning, because a centralized planner's mistake has far reaching consequences but a diverse market disregards individual failures and uses an adaptive selection process to find the most resiliant balance of various solutions to various problems, but we need policies that encourage the market to move toward the best long-term solutions. Government policies frame the problems facing the market in ways that make one or another set of strategies attractive.