The Price of Gas and Car Mileage

What to do about the price of gas? Certainly $4 gas made people think about their cars’ mileage. Prius sales boomed and then collapsed when gas went down to $2. Gas will go back up when the world economy recovers. The only way to keep fuel prices (per mile) low is to manufacture much more efficient cars. We could create a demand for such cars by maintaining gas at $4 per gallon with a tax, rebated in a progressive way, with perhaps some siphoned off to support carbon reducing schemes (public transportation, buying up old inefficient cars, subsidizing the purchase of very efficient cars). In the short run, this would still be terrible for a large part of the American population, who would have to pay for the gas long before receiving their rebate checks.

It would be simpler to put a tax of 10 cents a gallon on gas, rising yearly by 10 cents a gallon for 25 years. Instituted now, such a tax would hardly be noticeable. After 25 years gas would cost at least $4-$5 a gallon, probably—if the world economy recovers—more like $10. But by then, with luck, cars will be getting 100-150 miles per gallon, so, depending on the price of the cars, driving would be cheaper (or at least not more expensive) than now. Monies from the tax would go to support carbon reducing schemes, such as those listed above, perhaps including the subsidizing of solar panels, perhaps the development of very efficient cars.

While developing cars that get 100-200 miles to the gallon is not technically difficult, it is politically difficult to get there. Europeans pay over $5 a gallon for gas, have excellent public transportation systems and still drive everywhere in cars that are more efficient than ours but not that much more efficient. Almost all freight in Europe moves by truck rather than rail. Together with the gas tax, we would have to have rising fuel efficiency goals. A low but steadily increasing gas tax would focus our eyes on the goal.

During the last 30 years the country has lost a sense of community—that we are all in this together. I always felt that most strongly when I lived in New York City. But we are all in this together, not only as members of separate countries, but as inhabitants of the planet, and we will all share in earth’s pleasures and vicissitudes.