The Dark Side of Fuel Efficiency

With all the hoopla about global warming (even though it’s all unwarranted) and all the panic about the possibilities of $4.00-$5.00/gallon gasoline and $120/barrel crude oil, everyone in any official capacity is screaming about improving the CAFÉ standards for vehicle gas mileage—the rest of the nervous Nellies are screaming about hybrid cars.

You’d think the sky was falling or something!

For all the best efforts of California emissions laws, Los Angeles once again ranks as #1 in polluted cities. They don’t seem to realize it, but they are IMPORTING pollution from China by way of the jet stream. Now they want to be the torchbearers of the “Green Movement” by heralding higher emissions standards and raising gasoline miles-per-gallon minimums for car manufacturers because THEIR air and traffic are bad!

But there is a dark and sinister side to all this “efficiency frenzy” that isn’t being voiced, let alone discussed: taxes. For every gallon of gas we buy, the state levies a gas tax to help the general budget. If cars with better fuel efficiency were manufactured, then incorporated into our lives, we’d not only use less gas, we’d be paying less gas taxes—much to the woe of your state.

This, in turn, would force ailing states to jack up gasoline prices to make up for the gas tax revenue shortfall, much like what happened to the cigarette tax, and what is going to happen again to the cigarette tax through a recently-proposed child health care initiative. There would be little choice here—jack up the gas price, or jack up the sales tax on the cars causing the tax problem in the first place.

Never mind Saudi Arabia and OPEC, Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, Nigeria’s on-again, off-again political stability, or even Iran’s saber rattling. Never mind the hurricanes that can knock out our refineries for months, or the timely “seasonal fires” that seem to happen every spring just in time to knock supply offline, leading to gas spikes before the great college migrations south for sun—it’s our own government that can hurt us the most while we try to do good!

Higher emissions standards and higher mileage standards would serve to cause a near-instant jump to that proposed $4.00-$5.00/gallon gas and $120/barrel oil just by virtue of mandates for cleaner-burning (and more cleanly refined) product, coupled with the cars to run it. All those boutique fuels that the west coast uses currently would become the law of the land, and their current $3.95/gallon or so (average) would be considered a bargain.

Look at the great lengths some people want to go to for filling the tax coffers once again—and all in the guise of “doing good.” These are your gas tax dollars at work.