If we were honest with ourselves, it would be.
Jerome has a diary up right now, which alludes to part of the problem of 'high gas prices', and how Exxon/Mobil is only 'doing what we ask of them'. What Exxon is doing is taking advantage of the difference between the artificially low price of energy we are paying, versus the reality of its sustainability and it's true cost to society. Almost all hydrocarbons are a 'bargain', a Faustian bargain.
We have been given a free ride on burning of fossil fuels for a couple of centuries. For most of the time man has used fossil fuels, there has been little discussion or concern about the impact of using this technology on our planet. As science progressed and improved, we began to realize some horrible things.
Our children were being poisoned by lead. So we took lead out of gasoline, yet today the hydrocarbons and byproducts that lead to all sorts of other diseases still permeate our world. Lead was just an egregious example, easy to quantify and qualify as a nasty horrible pollutant.
Almost all hydrocarbons used by man as fuel which is burned create serious environmental problems with their byproducts, and the price of these technologies is not indicative of their real loaded costs in our biosphere, or its real impact on our fellow human beings.
GCC comes to mind, but it's also more direct and concrete. At least 30,000 people in the US die prematurely from coal dust alone. This is a conservative estimate. Some studies claim it approaches 100,000 a year.
http://healthandenergy.com/...
The cost of electricity produced by the burning of coal is grossly undertaxed. Billions of dollars, millions of hours of lost work and school time, doctor and hospital visits, medications required to treat asthma, emphysema, COPD and related illnesses are not part of the price of coal in your electric bill. But they should be.
We are, as we are often reminded, a wasteful nation. The US accounts for roughly one quarter of the world's energy usage, yet we are less than 5% of the world's population.
Our average consumption of energy per capita is 1,460 mWh/yr, yet for the EU it is 700 mWh/yr. Much of the disparity in our energy usage is not a result of living in very cold climates. We are just simply wasteful.
And, as Jerome pointed out in his diary, companies exist in a market model to help us be wasteful. The companies are not to blame for the fact we are so wasteful, greedy and shortsighted. They are supposed to make money, and they set a price based upon what we can pay.
Now comes the fun part, related to the title.
The price we pay for goods should represent the real costs, or else we end up in a situation where there are dead ends. And the rapid uncontrolled growth of the US in particular is a big concern. The nation's growth has been fed for many decades on artificially low energy prices, prices which do not take into account the real costs of all the effects of energy.
While the US leads in waste, we are not the only ones. The rest of world for the most part follows our lead - but only the US has such a gross energy per capita budget, given the relative climate of the nation.
Some places like the EU have understood the costs early on and have adopted taxes to help recoup some of the damage caused by the burning of hydrocarbons, some nations like Iceland and Germany have made great strides recently towards shifting away from hydrocarbons altogether.
Unfortunately for the US, which is a large country, the real costs of transportation and the energy to accomplish travel are quickly reaching a dead end. We have built up a huge infrastructure of travel on the ground [Interstate highways] and in the air which encourage waste. Just the modest increase to $4/gallon has resulted in a drop in gasoline usage.
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We need the price of all hydrocarbons to be taxed at its true value.
Gas/oil should be $15 or $20 a gallon.
Coal should be taxed at a much higher rate than it is now.
Update .. clarification:
This cannot happen overnight, it has to be phased in.
And the intent is to help the poor and working classes.
The money garnered from these taxes should be used first of all to provide those at the bottom of the economic ladder and the working poor/middle class with what they need to survive for basic electricity, heating and transport. Certain functions of commerce like trucking would need to be protected, as the price to operate transport would become simply overwhelming [it already is, for many independent truckers].
Then, the rest of this money collected from the taxation of these hydrocarbons at their real loaded costs would be available to consumers as loans; loans by the Federal government to adopt alternative energy, to buy the hardware to get off the grid, to purchase vehicles that operate on hydrogen.
[additional:] Of course, funding mass transit & bolstering our health care system to counteract the decades of poisoning our population suffered as a result of burning hydrocarbons would be part of where this taxation should go, as well.
No doubt, prices on many goods would go up; heavy items transported across great distances might become too expensive. To that I say 'good'. Do without them, or find a way to produce them locally.
If the taxation on hydrocarbons was adopted worldwide [and I think most countries would quickly follow suit], the US would have a resurgence of manufacturing as transport costs from China and other places would finally be truly reflected in the costs of these goods.
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This is just one development of many that shows we are technologically here. The science to make the change has been here, all along with PV based solar since the 70s.
http://blog.wired.com/...
Now is the time for political will. Those in the upper middle class and the rich will pay the full loaded costs of buying hydrocarbons. Perhaps they would reduce their usage, or not. It matters not.
This is no longer a question of simple supply and demand, it's a question of who makes the lions share of the money from the sale of hydrocarbon based fuels. With $12B in profits for Exxon/Mobil in one quarter, it's time for us to get some of our money back out of this shell game.
Raising the price of a gallon of gas to $15, and other hydrocarbon based fuels by a similar amount will be a shock, but it's a shock we can survive, and use the money generated from those can afford to pay it to make the changes needed to get away from hydrocarbons.
Not likely to happen, but a visionary leader could step forward and do it. Some will call this socialism, and I'd agree. It is socialism. It is providing a mechanism by way of the government to ensure an even playing field between consumer and producer, one which allows change that the producer may not like [but make no mistake, the producers will quickly adopt what is best for their business model, they will shift their emphasis quickly to adopt the change].
Back in Dwight Eisenhower's time, the nominal tax rate of those who made $400,000 a year or more was roughly 90%. By implementing a massive increase in the tax on hydrocarbons, we can effectively bring back that tax rate.
It's something we need to do, and it's long overdue.