I was looking at Robert Rapier's R squared blog post on a case study in cluelessness.It is a good hard look at some people's idea of what constitutes a fair price for gasoline, and it struck me that taxing fuels rather than giving tax breaks to biofuel producers may be a better way of promoting the use of bio ethanol and boidiesel, assuming that is what society wants to do... and I know that Robert thinks biofuels are a boondoggle.
His blog contains some pretty spicy stuff, but it strikes me
Technorati Tags: America, biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, ethanol
that supply and demand is hard for people to believe in when there are large oil companies to blame. Even if the biggest like ExxonMobil 'control' about 3% of the market, according to Richard.
I guess its emotional arguments that sway people more than the cold hard logic of the market, especially if we're dealing with something hard wired into swathes of the American people the "ideal" price of gas for many motorists being about $1/gal (or maybe a little below).
People do not have the right to drive. No society has the right to build sprawling cities (even if land is cheap) without adequate public transportation.
Societies should fully price in the costs of owning and using motor vehicles and travelling. We certainly don't do that in the UK but with comparatively high taxes on gas (which get higher with higher crude) we are some way towards that.
Now, should the price of gas more accurately reflect the amount of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases that will be produced when it's burnt? Should we include and element of carbon, offseting in the price of fuel? Fuels produced using non-reneable resources would be more expensive than renewables.Would that be a useful way of improving the viability of biofuels?