Anywhere else in the developed world, this proposal would be a no-brainer. But particularly under the Bush Admin. there seems absolutely no chance of this happening. The Bushies are already losing their core support due to deficits, the unwinnable war, the Meirs nomination, and so on. Why would they sever their bonds entirely by raising such a visible tax? Papa Bush went down agreeing to tax increases to deal with the fallout from the Reagan tax cuts, so the precedent is there for Bush and other Republicans.
The only way the idea would seem to have any hope of getting policy traction is by coupling it to a proposal to cut income taxes by an equivalent amount, making it revenue neutral. America needs a whole lot of revenues, of course, in order to cover its deficits, but the gas tax could be increased later to deal with that. The main initial objective should be to get acceptance of the concept of high gas taxes for general revenues (ie, not just road-building) and reduced overseas dependence. The neocons were even talking about the need for gas taxes so as to choke off funding for terrorists (from monies diverted from some Saudi elites) and ratchet down dependence on the unstable Middle East. Thomas Friedman wrote about this in his NYT column a few months back.

The author of the editorial says not once, but twice that decades of cheap gas encouaged people to buy large inefficient vehicles.  Maybe this is just me, but I can't understand how the author can think that.  When electricity was cheaper, that didn't encourage me to leave all the lights on downstairs when I went to sleep upstairs.  It didn't encourage me to leave the lights on during the day for now reason.  The only thing that relatively cheap gas did was it didn't discourage people.  I like semantics.  There is a big difference between "not like"'ing something and "dislike"'ing it.  Similarly, something that doesn't discourage me doesn't necessarily encourage me.

Take a look at the big gas guzzlers, and compare them against say a Geo Metro.  The sticker price on the entry level guzzler would have been at least 2x more than theMmetro was.  However the metro didn't come with all the great niceities and features that an Escape has (and that's one of the lower guzzling SUV's), and thus the only people who would buy a Metro are the people who are looking for the cheapest car.

It's the auto industry which has upsold inefficiency.  Up until the Smart car, there's been no high end efficient car in North America which was made to help drive demand towards efficiency.  The efficient cars were pushed into the corner and forgotten.  The more people wanted to keep up with the Jones, the more people had to sacrifice to efficiency, not just sticker price.

They have a quote from Ford's CEO saying that the era of cheap gas is over.  Well, what's Ford doing?  When they have a comfortable car which gets at least 40mpg and one can get all the seat-warming-demand-driving options, I'll believe that they actually care.  Until then, Ford is duckspeaking.

The standard argument against taxes seems to be: "I can spend more wisely than the government; the government will just fritter money away or hand it to the rich."  But is that true?

I used to drive through an intersection on a quiet country road.  Drivers on the other road had stop signs, but I could go right through.  A new town was developed nearby, and traffic increased, and during busy periods, it became hard for drivers on the other road to get through the stop signs.  Eventually they put in a four stop signs.  But even when there was no traffic, I had to stop.  And during busy periods, people began making up their own rules of precedence.  Sometimes, three or four cars would go through at once.  I knew it was a matter of time, and one day a crew started installing the poles for the traffic lights.  So then, even when there was no traffic, I had to wait for the light.  If people could have been a bit more orderly during busy periods, they wouldn't have had to wait for nothing at 11 PM.

I have come to the conclusion that we invite government regulation when we fail to regulate ourselves.  By living the cheap gas lifestyle, we are failing in a big way.  It would be preferable to find any other way to wean us off gasoline, but I don't think we can wait for the markets.

I can't see any politician backing gasoline taxes, unless it is part of his retirement speech, but some good first steps would be to eliminate special status for SUVs and trucks, and instituting extra taxes on vehicles that fall way outside CAFE standards.

I have always supported a higher fuel cost, and I wish we had done it years ago.  But now it may be getting too late.  When the economy was strong, higher fuel prices would still have been regressive, but if increased gradually the benefit would have been worth it.  Instead we subsidized Hummers.  By now we would be driving more efficient autos, the US auto industry would not have thrown all its product development money into SUVs with so much of the population in debt to own them.  Now, when the economy is (in my view) teetering on very shaky foundations, it would be a huge burden to many.  

And I have another concern: Where would the tax money go?  Given the irresponsible way the US government has used all the tax money I've given lately, I've no confidence it would not end up in the pockets of the administrations cronies.  I'm a liberal, and I've never been a supporter of the point of view that government is bad - but with corruption on such a scale comes the destruction of confidence.  Now I am trying to plan for the coming storms, and I need that money to prepare.  The rising fuel costs are hurting, and I think I'd rather keep it for my family than have it stolen or squandered on outrageous mistakes.

Bottom line:  The only way I would support it now is if it were heavily graduated to alleviate the burden on the poor, and if all of the revenue generated, along with massive portions of the defense budget, were spent on changing the nation's energy infrastructure away from oil.

The bottom line is that most suburbs are going to die in the post-Peak Oil age.  The sooner that we kill them off, the better off we all will be, and the best way to kill them off as fast as possible is a sharply higher gasoline tax.

Suburbs can aptly be compared to a fast growing cancer.  Chemotherapy is a poison designed to kill all fast growing cells, including cancer cells.  

A sharply higher gasoline tax is a form or chemotherapy that the nations needs to take in order to have a chance of surviving the post-Peak Oil age.  

How about a feebate program instead?  Find the mean fuel economy, rebate a certain dollar value for every gpm below the fleet mean sold last year (have to use the fuel per unit distance to keep everything linear).  Charge a fee for every gpm above the mean.  The mean keeps improving, putting pressure for further improvements to fuel economy by the manufacturers.

Progressive rather than regressive -- poor people by smaller cars which have better mileage.  Can be run as a zero-sum system rather than a tax.  Subsidizes the capital cost of technology like diesels and hybrids.  Doesn't involve the government picking a winner via diesel, hybrid, diesel-hybrid, electric, fuel cell, etc.

I would suggest that in order to compete with foreign manufacturers the US would have to gradually introduce a feebate to give Ford and GM an opportunity to change their ways.

I know this has come up before, I think in California, but I think something that would be "more fair" than a tax an increased tax on gas would be a tax on road usage. We would still need a tax on gas but I think we should also tax (what I call) pound (or ton) miles. Once a given time period (perhaps once a year when tabs need to be renewed) the owner of a vehicle must take their vehicle in and someone would check the number of miles driven since the last check-in.  The number of miles driven would be multiplied by the wieght of the vehicle to determine the pound miles/ton miles. There could also be brackets for weight "classes".

This tax would tax those who "use" (read as "wear") our roads more. Heavier vehicles cause more road wear than lighter ones however, lighter vehicles that drive more miles also wear on our roads. This type of tax would discourage heavy bulky gas guzzling vehicles (such as trucks and SUVs) that aren't neccesary to get from point A to point B. I think this type of tax would have a better possibility of getting passed (seeing that many states are running short on highway construction/maintainance funds).

I suggested something like this a while ago - we can expect gas price volatility, and a tax designed to reduce that volatility would (A) at least somewhat reduce consumption (though Stuart's recent posts suggest that will only be through increased efficiency in some fashion), and (B) therefore ensure that prices before the tax remain lower than they would otherwise be, so that the extra revenue from the tax goes to the government rather than to oil company profits.

This would actually take the form of a constant tax per gallon (say $1.33/gallon) MINUS a percentage of the retail price before tax (say 33.33%), and both terms would disappear when they would be otherwise result in a negative tax (for retail prices of $4.00/gallon or more in this case). For gasoline before tax of $0.50/gallon, the after tax price would be $1.66/gallon; at $1.00/gallon it would be $2.00, at $2.00/gallon it would be $2.66, at $3.00/gallon it would be $3.33, etc.

Some people on this site are "It must be good if it hurts." types.
If we are running out of cheap oil, and I think we are, then gas prices are going to rise on their own and don't need any help from us. If we are not about to run out of oil and gas prices are not going to rise, why make them rise anyway?

Why not go back to subsidizing ethanol and put farmers to work again? This would be a better use of the tax money, as it would foster production of ethanol stock, which could be used to drop the price of gasoline via gasohol.

Frankly, the farmers could use it and so could the drivers of SUVs....

This is the only way to go. By living at large now we are passing the costs of our consumption to our children who will pay the bills. If we had a government looking a little bit more ahead after the next election it would start making us pay the real price of gas now.

Somewhere Richard Heinderberg said that if we were to produce oil from renewable resources it would cost 150-200$ per barrel. It is obvious that we are stealing our lifestyle from the generations to come and I am totally against that - the difference (300%) must be taxed out and invested in renewables, period.

One day before this, the NY Times had another editorial.  It argued for increased SUBSIDIES for home heating oil.  It talked about the increased cost of heating fuel "this winter," and argued that "Heating aid for the needy is a matter of common decency."

While I'm sure there's some truth here about the impact of the increased costs on the poor, it still seems a bit absurd for the paper to argue in favor of heating oil subsidies one day and increased gas taxes the next.  

Their argument for subsidies seems based on the misguided assumption that things will be better next winter.  But assuming prices stay high, then so would the subsidies -- year after year -- with little incentive for poor homeowners or their landlords to increase efficiency.

I'm not sure what the solution is, though.  We could subsidize better insulation, new windows, etc., but I'm sure people would be more likely to fall through the cracks that way.

I have 2 points to make: (a) gas taxes are regressive (b) government will waste my tax money in subsidizing wars, for example

One problem with a per gallon gas tax is that tax revenues will go down as mpg increases if VMT doesn't increase to make up for it. Maintaining roads and other infrastructure is expensive, and even more expensive if neglected. If you raise the CAFE you really need to raise gas taxes to keep up with it. It would be more intelligent to tax gasoline like a sales tax rather than on the volume.

Secondly, I'm beggning to think that the real problem we face is not peak oil, but peak CO2. I just saw a presentation on the CO2 implications of oil extraction from a prof in UC Berkeley Energy Resources Group, I don't have the name available now but I'll probably do a write up of his paper for my blog or thewatt when I have time.

Mixing my thoughts and his info it seems to me there is plenty of oil. Enough so that we'll probably face major damage from climate change before we start to run out of oil . The real danger with oil is supply variability due to climate (e.g. Katrina/Rita) and geopolitical effects. That can make the supply tight at times, but in the long run the kinks can work themselves out, provided the climate hasn't become too uncooperative.

The best argument against a fuel tax is that govenment is simply unable to guide subsidies without being influenced by powerful constituencies - imagine more incentives for ethanol, just for example, combined with the waste inherent in any bureaucracy.
The best argument for such a tax is that virtually all elected politicians would be turned out of office simply for proposing such an unpopular idea. (But, I think they're on to us.)
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Capital markets are both inefficient and unfair at distributing resources, except when compared with all other methods.
Sadly, we must wait for reduced supplies and accompanying high prices to discourage the use of fossil fuels because of the unavailability of an all-knowing, benevolent dictator, who in any case could only take power by force.

I have more than a small amount of antipathy toward the general notion  of having the government uses taxes as a way to discourage the things it doesn't like and encourage the things it does. This concept has a built in presumption that the federal government has an inherent right to micro-manage our lives. Furthermore, if we raise the taxes on gasoline to discourage consumption, one must ask what is the government going to do with this increased revenue.  It already has too much of our money to piss away on a bloated defense budget and myriad pork-barrel projects,  and I don't want to give it a dime more than I have to. They cannot be trusted.

If it is such a good thing for the government to decide how much fossil fuel I should use, then why not not one step further and have gas rationing and military checkpoints to determine if you have driven more than your allotted quota of miles?  Government-enforced conservation is another step on the road toward fascism. Which is where we very well might end up anyway.

In my view, the best role of the government in this whole mess is to help fund those massive infrastructure projects that the private sector cannot risk committing to: things such as nuclear power plants, biomass projects (but not ethanol), oil shale projects, mass transit, and misc alternative energy projects and subsidies.  Changing a whole mature infrastructure is not something that is going to be accomplished very readily by a short-term profit-motivated private sector.

this is the system that pays for a lot of the welfare state in norway: (1 USD=6.51 NOK)

weight tax,           NOK/kg    
first 1150 kg         34,75
next 250 kg           69,50
next 100 kg          139,00
rest                 161,66

displacement tax,     NOK/cm3
first 1200 cm3        10,26
next 600 cm3          26,86
next 400 cm3          63,18
rest                  78,93    

Engine power tax,    NOK/kW
first 65 kW          134,22
next  25 kW          489,54
next  40 kW          979,38
rest               1 657,36

in addition there is:
a 25% tax on top of the import price of the car
a typical european tax on fuel
and in the cities you usually have to pay 15 NOK to enter

a calculator for taxes

examples:
Volkswagen golf
with data from this page
tax:108948 NOK=16735 USD
ford excursion
with data from this page
tax:915373 NOK= 140610 USD

the tax system is similar in denmark, but I believe you pay a lot less in some other european contries.

some comments from SUV-land?

The types of things can be done in a very homogenized single-ethnic-group society such as Norway's are not the same types of things you can do in a fractured, multi-ethnic society such as the US. Most people in Norway are (obviously) Norwegians, whereas most people in the US are God-knows-what. There is a big difference. Norway is like a quaint New England town meeting, while the US is more like an inner-city urban city council meeting. One is orderly and chummy; the other is chaotic and nasty.  There is little cooperation in the US. It's every man (or group) for himself (themselves).  You can't compare the two.

I still have a great deal of trouble with this notion that a finely tuned tax policy is going to get us out of this mess. Taxes are a means of taking someone else's money, and those who can tax are those who have power over the rest of us.  Taxation for the sake of discouraging oil consumption is nothing more than state sponsored economic coercion. It is giving even more power to the federal government.  Contrary to what has been said here: the government is NOT us, and the government is NOT your friend.  

While the government can play a role in funding the mega projects that will be needed, I don't want them in my pants 24/7. And neither should you!  

Liberals think the gov should do more, conservatives think less is better. As noted earlier, the ny times advocates both higher taxes and higher subsidies on energy; this springs from the contradictory desires to make things more efficient while not hurting anybody, or at least a group you especially like.

Reagan had the thought that cutting taxes without cutting spending would eventually force the gov to get out of "non-critical" areas such as welfare. Bush thinks the same, but does not dare cut spending on today's welfare queens, the farmers. At any rate, the gov is both strapped and controlled by conservatives, so there will be no energy taxes and no more subsidies for the poor, who might freeze, while no farmer is allowed to fail. Does anybody remember that a proposal to limit farm cotton subsidies to $200k/family member was overwhelmingly voted down?

By the way, ethanol subsidies began when oil was under $25/barrel (I think).  Now that oil is $60/barrel, and farmers receive a 2.4x higher price for their ethanol product, shouldn't the subsidies be over? Are we finding that as oil goes up the subsidy goes up, too?

It's interesting that the NY Times would come out with an editorial today about raising gas taxes. Why now? A series of posts by Heading Out at TOD highlight the fact that

• Reserves from the SPR and additional supply from Europe are due to run out soon -- distillates production is tailing off
• Home heating oil demand is just about to kick in
• GOMEX production is still slow to come online

I guess I'm saying that gasoline prices are artificially low at the moment and proabably will spike upwards sometime in November. Maybe that will reduce demand but Stuart's posts say not and demand appears inelastic. So, there is reason to believe that prices will soon rise anyway and there's also reason to believe that it won't affect demand much. Gasoline taxes? Don't know if it would make any difference. Certainly, the political will to do that does not and never will exist in America. On the other hand, if prices don't increase next month, I will be baffled and bewildered...

I can almost hear my European friends breathing hard over my left shoulder as I tpye this, under their breath muttering, " It's about time!".

Cool impose a new tax. It won't hurt any one but the poor!

The richer folks who live out where they drive 20 plus miles to the work place will just buy a little less, but the poorer folks will eat the costs by not getting any extras at all.  

 Increase the Tax on a gas GUZZLER first, then talk about a gas tax.  Drop the "truck" tax break that made SUV's a money saver car purchase.  Make anyone one that wants to own a new gas guzzler pay.  

 But what to do with all the poor guys in old gas guzzlers? Or the farmers, Hey what about all that diesel being used, are we talking tax that too?  Just think when Mom and Pop farmer hear that they have to pay X number of Dollars more on the fuel for the Tractor what they might think about What YOU are going to eat next time. Maybe they will forget about you and just go into living off their own land instead you too.

 Be careful How you try to fix the problems,  You might end up with more problems not less.

ps,  I do not see the tax in our future, I see the Oil just getting less and less.

First of all, congratulations to all the posters on this site.  I am learning so much from all of you.  I think individual conservation and sustainability practices are fine, but the buck does NOT stop with each of us.  It is the JOB of government to protect society for the greater good.  Where they are doing that, ie.  no smoking in bars and restaurants, they should be supported.  Where they are NOT, such as NOT prohibiting vehicles from Central Park and major urban areas, they should be held to account.  If there was not a mass transit system in Manhattan, it would have developed along the lines of Staten Island, only smaller.  As for gas taxes, of course that is one of the main ways to change bad practices, and encourage smart usage.  I like taxing luxury homes and cars.  Surcharges are already here, with every transportation firm from UPS to Maersk charging MORE for all shipments.
As for having a conversation as a NATION, nothing will accelerate that like higher gas prices.  Believe me, the poor will NOT freeze to death, but the middle class will go kicking and screaming toward more sustainable ideas.