tax what you want less of

want less pollution and gasoline consumption? Tax cars and gasoline.

Want more hybrid cars? Subsidize them.

It should be budget neutral: tax gas guzzlers to subsidize fuel sippers, I say.

It should be non-discriminatory: not just a subsidy for GM’s Volt, but for hybrids in general and all other fuel sippers.

By the way, we do have CAFE standards that already take care of fuel economy, but, hey, why not shoot OPEC with multiple bullets?

Which is paid for mostly with the gas tax. I’m all for setting the sum of fuel taxes and registration fees at whatever level is required to take care of the roads. Most analysis shows that spending on roads is in total less than is collected in fuel taxes and other user fees. Unfortunately, governments large and small like to slice, dice and co-mingle money to the point that it is very hard to sort out what is being used for what. At the moment, road user fees are being used to subsidize mass transit projects, not the other way around.

We also need other infrastructure, such as recycling, exchange, and disposal facilities for the batteries. There could be incentives in the form of research grants to create batteries with greater range, longer life, greater capacity, greater portability.

After all, we do subsidize the coal, gas and oil industries by granting them tax incentives for drilling new wells, and we defer or excuse charges for extracting on public lands. We also pay for roads into extraction areas, wildlife management plans, and environmental enforcement.

The bottom line is that we can also use battery storage technology to save energy in other ways. For example, using solar panels or concentrated solar power to recharge batteries used to power a home air conditioner, or to run a home generator.

Cars need to be considered as part of the holistic solution that addresses our energy consumption problems. Otherwise, we will free ourselves from the oil companies and run into the arms of the coal industry.

In general, there should be enough sufficient-income early-adopters who can afford a Volt to fuel its market-entry and escort it into volume, just like there have been for $1500 DVD players, $2,000 Blu-Ray players, $20,000 plasma flat panel TVs, etc. The key for GM is to make sure that if the initial instances of a Volt drivetrain in an automobile come in at $40,000+, the car has enough drama to excite, and enough quality in its human touch points, to be satisfying. If GM can then prove that it has cash bottlenecks to scaling production to demand, then it can make its case for Federal help. Besides, taking some of the health care burden off GM is a potentially much better way for Federal dollars to help them.

If Americans aren’t sophisticated enough to see their intrinsic self-interest in buying a Volt over an imported alternative, subsidies won’t help there. The earlier hybrid subsidy disproportionately benefited Prius over other alternatives like Ford Escape Hybrid and equal-mileage ICE cars. All that subsidy did at the market level was to amplify already extant (and distorted) perceptions.

I’d like to see near-term mass subsidy of rooftop solar for residences and business, and if the double-speaking Gore-ites actually believe the doom they are pushing, then also financing for large-scale fixed-location power generation carbon sequestering.

But what I’d REALLY like is for the real crisis to get some attention: Water. Oil we can deal with. We need a continental water storage, transport and management system, and we need aggressive deployment of reverse-osmosis seawater desalination in water-short regions. We need extensive maintenance on our water delivery systems. This is all going to cost. We can deal with $200 oil — a lot of new sources of energy including unconventional oils become economic at that point. Cars are going to become more efficient regardless of subsidies. It’s on water that we need a helping hand from Mr. Big.

Phil

1) Walking (shoe subsidization?)
2) Public transport
3) Bicycling/rollerblading
4) Motorcycling

If you want to confine it to mpg period, Do subsidies for motorized vehicles which start at infinity mpg (totally electric?) and work down.

Start at 100mpg, then 90mpg, then 80mpg….

As to subsidies, so many throw this word around. Everything the government does is subsidized, vitiating any meaning of the word. There are only a few user fee taxes – including the gas tax – whether or not you believe its set high enough.

No, I don’t want to subsidize the Volt. But the tax credit subsidy of the Prius and Hondas set a bad precedent, didn’t it? AutoblogGreen has news on a $12k tax credit for a hybrid. Bad news is that its for a hybrid Peterbilt…..

The government would be better served through a graduated penalty tax on engine size like the rest of the world has. Consumer would have choice, they want the big v8, pay a huge tax, and the government would have people switching to smaller engined vehicles to avoid the taxes.”

The displacement of the engine is only weakly associated with the mileage and depends heavily on the driving habits of the operator. Even if you thought taxing mileage or CO2 emissions or whatever was a good idea, wouldn’t it make sense to tax that, rather than some arbitrary physical characteristic of the engine? A 2.4 liter jeep gets much worse gas mileage than a 3.0 liter camry or even a 3.8 liter buick, and a 6.0 liter ‘Vette can do better then a lot of four-bangers if it’s not caned.

They don’t sound nearly as enticing when you call them “taxpayer subsidies”.

I like the fact that we have what will someday be a text-book lesson in market economics sitting on dealer lots right now and people are arguing about how we can lower fuel use and whether or not we should subsidize electric cars.

Crazy, I know. Americans are more and more stuck to the teet of government gimmes. It’s like a nation of Homers in a doughnut shop.