Culture Vulture

One of the daffier ideas that’s come down the Presidential campaign pipeline recently is the summer gas tax holiday. It sounds nice, particularly as prices at the pumps inch — or more likely leap — their way towards $4 per gallon for unleaded regular and beyond. There’s no reason to think they’ll stop at that new threshold of pain. One recently released report predicted $7 per gallon within a few years. The dynamics of the petroleum market are defying the laws of classical capitalism. Supplies are tight, and despite markedly higher prices, demand remains on an upswing. So prices will keep on rising until enough consumers and people who build cars for a living “get it” — and start carpooling, biking or riding the bus to work a lot more than we do now. The auto industry should — but probably won’t — drag out of the closet every fuel efficient piece of technology they’ve tucked away, from hybrids, to electric cars, to solar-powered cars, to cars that run on vegetable oil and any other kind of liquid. The problem is much, much bigger than any of us think. Turning the Titanic around would have been child’s play compared to the challenge that looms before not only the U.S., but the world at large when it comes to not only energy independence but reducing demand to a sustainable level so that all the world’s wealth doesn’t wind up in a handful of countries most Americans still couldn’t find on a map. It’s not really an option either to frantically drill for new deposits of oil in remote or environmentally sensitive spots that would only provide a small trickle, in any event, of what is needed to slake the world’s thirst for petroleum.
So in the face of this enormous challenge, what kind of leadership do we get from Washington, D.C. or the campaign trail? The counterproductive simplicity of a gas tax holiday, precisely the opposite course of what we should be doing. If anything, the price of gas probably should go higher — at least until whatever administration is in office wakes up, smells the coffee and gets serious about supporting alternatives to our present model of cars with combustion engines burning gasoline at current mileage levels as our primary way of getting around.
Barack Obama was the only one of the three major surviving aspirants to the Presidency who gets it on this issue. He correctly spoke out firmly against the idea, arguing that it would do nothing to solve the long term problems and was Washington-style, quick-fix, appease the voters at all costs politics.
That was a rare example of a modern day profile in courage, especially revealing of his strength of character when buffeted by a controversy involving his former pastor. Hopefully most voters are sophisticated enough to see behind the muddled thinking both Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain displayed on this issue.
The first problem is that this federal gas tax money - more than $28 billion — is desperately needed to repair the nation’s crumbling highways, bridges and tunnels. Foregoing the revenue of federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day could slice somewhere between $7-9 billion out of that sum. At a time when much more than $28 billion is needed, this is lunacy. And forget Hillary Clinton’s idea of shifting the burden to oil companies via windfall profits or increased royalties taxes. That shift might be sensible, particularly if those funds were directed to bulking up the federal support for renewable energy sources like wind, solar or geothermal. We need to build those industries to scale up to be economically feasible to drastically reduce our oil consumption, but Congress and the President seem to have concrete overshoes on when it comes to working out a deal to point us in that direction. It’s almost criminal.
But cutting a deal to shift that money away from oil companies to offset a gas tax hike is little more than cynical election politics. There is a real question about whether it could even be voted through Congress, although many may feel voter’s angst on the subject of gas prices could be neatly deflected by the superficial appeal of reducing pump prices by a marginal amount. But all a gas tax would really do is punch another multi-billion dollar hole in the already yawning federal budget deficit.
Sadly, John McCain, who should know better, is also advocating this wrongheaded measure. Now that we’re past the Iowa primary and McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, he has re-discovered his voice on the ethanol boondoggle, once again hammering it correctly as a misguided government subsidy. But he too has fallen victim to the temptation to tell the voters what he thinks they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear.
And what people need to hear is that carving 20 cents or so out of the cost of a gallon of gas not only will not save a lot of money — the oil producing nations will see to that — but it puts off for another few months the price signal that needs to be sent to pound the message home that there is no substitute for fuel conservation and energy efficient vehicles that are leagues beyond what Detroit seems capable of producing now. Thirty miles to a gall on seems like a big deal to these guys, but we need cars that average 60, 70, 80 or much more than that. That would drop the cost of driving back down to a level supportable by the economy, as well as put us on the path towards energy independence, and, by the way, reducing all those carbon emissions most scientists are convinced are at the heart of climate change.
We’re running out of time to make these wrenching changes happen with a relatively minimal amount of pain. Relatively, because there will be pain, but nothing like what will happen 20 years from now if we put our heads back in the sand on this subject like we did as a nation in the 1980s and 1990s.