I read an automotive editorial by an automotive

journalist. (We have those in the Midwest, you know.) I can't remember his name, but his point was that if you want to get serious about incentivising gas-conservation, you will raise the

price of gas till gas-abuse directly hurts the

consumer. He suggested a program of rising gas taxes, rising slowly enough to give us time to adjust, turn our car fleet over, etc. The end-goal would be tas taxes here as high as in Europe.

He also suggested taxing carowners for cars above

a certain engine capacity or horsepower-level, and

applying that tax each year against the carowner

when he/she goes to re-register the car--an excess

horsepower/excess engine-capacity tax. That could

also slowly rise over the years to a pain-inducing

level. Slowly, to give the American car industry

time to adjust as the car-buying public was also

adjusting. His point was, don't blame the industry for selling what consumers wanted to buy.

If we want the consumers to buy efficiency, we have to make wastefulness hurt, and taxes at the

pump and at the DMV are the place to apply the incentive where it incentivises. He was no fan of

CAFE and neither am I. And that's what I once told a bright young Sierra Club volunteer when he

wanted my signature for a "stronger CAFE" petition. If his organization wanted my signature

on something, they would have to send him out with

a petition to tax gas consumption at the level of

the individual gas consumer.

Why don't California and those 10 other states

which want to regulate CO2 emissions get together

on a unitary harmonized gas tax/ excess horsepower

tax/ excess engine-capacity tax policy? And why don't they use that tax money to restore our missing mass transit systems within the borders of

California and those 10 other states? I would love to see parts of America have passenger rail

systems as advanced as the 19th Century Legacy

passenger rail systems I saw between Prague and

Budapest on a trip there one time. Wouldn't that

be a great thing for 21st Century America? To have train travel as modern and advanced as the

Austro-Hungarian Empire had achieved by 1910? Its

about time, wouldn't you say? We could build such

a system within the Blue States and we could call

it BlueTrak. If we made it electric, like what

I saw in the former Habsburg Lands, we could run it off of anything that would turn a turbine: wind, hydroelectric, tidal power, wave power,

bio-mass, mega-facility solar as being currently

trialed in the Mojave Desert, you name it. We

could delete oil almost entirely from the ground

transportation portfolio within the borders of

the BlueTrak States.

Or we can waste our time with: New CAFE! CAFE

Lite! or other regulatory evasions to avoid facing

that which has been proven to work for all the world to see in Europe and Japan.

Instead of dancing around CAFE standards and trying to come up with artful alternatives, why not do what the so-called conservatives advocate and let the market decide? But I mean really let the market decide.

Let's stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry and let the true cost of oil be revealed. No more loan guarantees for new pipelines--if the companies who would build them don't want to take the risk, then they don't get built until the price of oil is sustained at a high enough level to bring them back to the table.

People will not alter their consumption if they continue to be insulated from the true cost of oil. So instead of giving Republicans a new raft of taxes to complain about, I say we hold their feet the the fire of their own ideaology and let the market work its magic.

Ukiyo offers an interesting alternate approach

toward raising the price of oil high enough to force thinking. It could work to an extent IF...

we force the price of oil ALL the WAY up to ALL

of its true costs. Unfortunately, that will have

to mean some taxes on oil. For example, one of

the true costs of oil is all the wars we fight for

oil. The Iraq war is just the latest. All the

money spent on all aspects of that war is paid for

by our income taxes. Which means that all of us

who have income but don't have cars are subsidising the price of oil for those of us who

DO have cars. The answer? Put a National Oil

Security Tax on oil and oil products. Let the

people who use oil pay for the war for oil when

they pay for the oil. That would be Truth In

Pricing.

Once again, we get an article from Little and Salon that is almost meaningless becuase it lacks crucial information. The peaking of global oil production will happen whether we prepare for it or not. The problems will be bad whether we increase CAFE standards or not. The price of oil will rise precipitously as we continue to approach and then go over the peak.

AS the Hirsch Report showed, peak oil will lead to shortages and long-term problems unless we start a crash mitigation program 20 years ahead of the peak. Unfortunately, the available data point to a peak within 10 years. There are no silver bullet solutions to this problem. We're going to have to do everything we can as soon as possible.

It makes no sense to discuss fuel efficiency without discussing the impending peak of oil production. It's like talking about baseball without ever mentioning the pitcher.

a) If you spend $48,000 on a 9mpg SUV you probably don't notice or care too much about the price of gas.

b) If you really want to starve them out with $10/gal gas what do you think the working poor and lower middle class who have to drive to their 2 jobs a day will do?

c) If really high prices are a palaver then gross overconsumption must be a virtue too. Except that it's not.

The claim that ratcheting up the standards is risky and unreasonable stem from the fact that we've never tried it. And at a time when Detroit is imploding what better time to force a few concessions on them; something we've been asking them to do for 30 years? What are they going to do? Go Broke?

And if the idea of gas taxes is unattractive to you then simply impose a MPG fee on each states' vehicle registration. You are free to drive your truck, hell you can leave it running in the driveway all night if you want but the cost of keeping it registered will be inversely proportional to the fuel efficiency. Set up some kind of clean air escrow fund or home heating assistance program with the surplus if you need a justification.

In my state, NC, something like 70% of all new vehicles registered last year and this year were either pickups or SUV's. Clearly the fuel cost of running them is not an issue for the people who buy them. So tinkering with the price of fuel is counterproductive.