This is not out of line with the price of fuel in some countries already; I think it demonstrates that the technology is quite possibly on the edge of economic viability for closing the carbon cycle of gasoline, even if we don't get hundredfold improvements in the technology. That's pretty good news for everybody.
In Sweden we're around the equivalent of 7.2 USD / gal, due to high taxes.
However, and I expect this to be the case in most European high-taxed countries, the taxes are just fed in to the general tax revenue of the government. Not ear marked for e.g capture programs.
These taxes do of course fund some inovation projects etc, but I think it would be a hard sell politically even here to direct all carbon-related taxes directly into buying Co2 capture.
For example, as renewables have grown larger in Sweden, the government has started taxing the production of solar power on larger installations (≈ roof of a warehouse), even if the energy is never sold/transmitted to the grid.
The biggest problem with any cost-driven incentive is that it has the ability to fuck people over. If you make electricity too expensive you end up with fuel poverty. There is no way out of it. There is no other 'choice' that poor people can make. Same with water charges. What do you do if you can't afford your water bill?
But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.
If you create a tax that disproportionately hits poor drivers, you can balance that out with redistributive taxes - and incentives for buying electric cars that mainly benefit poor people.
Currently most incentives for buying electric cars benefit the wealthy. For example in the UK, I can get 45% of my tax back through salary sacrifice on an electric car, whereas a person on basic rate only gets 20%. It should arguably be the other way around i.e. a "super deduction" for the poor, capped at basic rate relief for the rich.
A cost driven incentive can still be viable. It needs to be accompanied by practical replacement solutions. For example, if driving cars becomes too expensive for people, then public transport needs investments and needs to cover more ground, to help people out.
Yep. I think they need to implement a "Fuel cost equivalent tariff" on public transport. FCET because everyone switching from a car needs to do this gradually so you can't include the depreciation etc because they are sunk costs. It costs me ~£65 for 50l of fuel which gets me about 450-500 miles in my car. If I'm travelling alone I should be able to buy a walk-up train ticket for that price, with a 20% discount for pre-planning my journey. If I'm travelling with my family then group tickets should be discounted so each extra person is a nominal extra amount as long as we all travel together. Tickets should be integrated across all transport modes like they are in Switzerland.
The big problem with this, in the UK at least, is that the trains are already full even though they are much more expensive than this. We really need more capacity but the hugely corrupt debacle that is High speed 2 is going to turn people against building better public transport.
> But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that.
So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?
