Gas Taxes (Keep ‘Em on the Road!)

Paul Krugman offers us this map showing the breakdown of gas taxes across the country.

(Taken from: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/eat-here-and-get-gas/ )

This comes in the run-up to his indictment yesterday of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and his failed (and yet somehow still lauded) economic policy prescriptions. Christie refuses to raise the gas tax (or any taxes for that matter), scrapped plans for a new rail tunnel into New York City, and instead invested state funds in a new megamall and a casino project in Atlantic City. The solution to the economic crisis is not more parking lots, highways, and 6000 mile supply chains, but development of useful public infrastructure and businesses that support the local economy. Also, raising one of the lowest gas taxes in the country by even a few cents seems like a quick way to raise some much-needed cash. I guess that in the new political model, logic need not apply…not that it ever really did.

Also interesting to note from this map that many of the cities most notorious for sprawl, traffic congestion, etc. are in states where the gas tax is in the lower third: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Atlanta, Oklahoma City, DC, St Louis, Kansas City (though California, and New York are clearly the outliers in this series). It seems like there’s a pretty clear correlation between cheap gas prices and sprawling development patterns based solely on tax rates.

Just in case you thought these issues were limited to the US…

The UK and Argentina are willing to go to the brink of war over a small amount of oil in an incredibly difficult to drill region: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/12/falkland-islands-premier-oil-argentina-dispute

As Kunstler points out in the video below, we’re quickly running out of easy-to-drill sources of oil, and to support our destructive habits we’re forced to turn to difficult and inefficient sources. There is an estimated 300 million barrels of oil in this region around the Falkland Islands that the UK company Premier Oil hopes to extract. To put that in perspective, the US consumes ~20 million barrels of oil per day, the UK consumes ~1.8 million barrels per day, and the world as a whole consumes ~84 million barrels per day. So there’s enough oil here to run the US for about 2 weeks, the UK for about 6 months, or the world for 3.5 days. As Kunstler would say, “goodbye happy motoring!”

How are you liking Peak Oil so far?

In this TEDx talk James Kunstler points to current events that are proving true the predictions he foresaw in his seminal work The Long Emergency.

Kunstler again rails against the belief that the earth is a “Bon-bon with a creamy nougat center of oil” which we just have to locate and extract.

The solution is not electric cars. Technology does not equal energy.  We need to live simply.  End happy motoring.

Enjoy!