The majority of oil used in the US goes for transportation. Nearly half of the total is personal transportation. There are costs involved - climate change, other pollution, decreased health through lower exercise, death and injury in accidents, etc - but most of these costs are not linked to the price of gasoline. Perhaps it would be reasonable to tax gasoline to include some of these costs. The money could then be redistributed to the problem areas. Some of the money could go directly into healthcare to deal with obesity and other health problems for example ...
It turns out you can estimate some of these impacts. One
recent piece of work (pdf) is from The American Public Health Association. Some of their estimates are $142B for obesity caused by loss of exercise from using a car for short trips, $180B for death and injuries in car crashes, and $80B for healthcare costs and premature death from automobile cased air pollution. Issues like climate change are not considered.
We burn about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year in the US. If we just taxed for obesity and air pollution, the additional tax on gasoline would be about $1.58 a gallon. Add accidents and the tax would move to $2.87 a gallon and would begin to capture, in this model, some of the additional costs of driving and link them to something the driver could control.
We're paying these costs anyway - making the real culprit (us) pay at a point that might throttle the use may be sensible.
on being happy with less
It is frustrating seeing people poke fingers at the government and the oil industry as the main precipitators of the disaster that continues to unfold in the Gulf.
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