An endangered species – a market-friendly idea – was spotted recently in an interview with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: The Obama appointee is considering replacing gasoline taxes with a tax on vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) as a means to fund highway and transportation infrastructure maintenance. He asserts that this kind of “outside the box” thinking will typify the Obama administration’s initiatives (Something to be devoutly hoped for).
If they actually replace the gas tax with a VMT tax, rather than piling on, it would be a great improvement in terms of infrastructure maintenance, as a person’s impact on highway infrastructure is proportional to miles-driven, rather than gasoline consumed. A gas-guzzler driving 1,000 miles does the same damage to the highway as a fuel-sipper that drives 1,000 miles, unless they are radically different in weight class.…
The top agenda item for many climate activists (James Hansen, for example) is stopping the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel, and the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new coal plants at various planning stages could swamp by as much as 5 to 1 all the emissions reductions the European Union, Russia, and Japan might achieve under the Kyoto Protocol. Either climate activists kill coal, or coal will bury Kyoto.…
The wisdom of the ages applies to energy. The smartest-guys-in-the-room approach to energy transformation by DOE secretary Stephen Chu, based on a false premise of the unsustainability of hydrocarbon energy, should note such history. The silver bullets that he is looking for have a long, failed history for good reason.
Take for example the electric car,…