fuel prices

[Blueneon]

Dont get me wrong, I think it stinks how unfair fuel and road tax is, and the way this or any other government is questionable. I fully understand that time is running out, no way can this keep going but as yet it seems that most people (including government ministers) are hiding in the sand, Other ways of doing things (electric, LPG etc) are there but as the infrastructure isnt then people will still pump the gas.

Im not so stupid as to not cringe at the 98.9p I have to pay, but like i said in my post above I cant see the point in whinging over somthing that is very unlikley to change, remember th blockades? all that achieved was pissing people off, causing distress and upset and peoples wages! (I was unable to get to work, If i met a protester I would ask him to explain why we had to struggle so much for a while after he thrust his ideology on to me and my family. I didnt ask him to stop the damn Tankers!!! He would be just as annoyed if i came into his little life and caused so much disruption.)

Right Im going to have a lie down and cool off...

[Tofu @ AE86]

at the present time, the €/lt here(portugal) is around 1.22€ per liter(95)...for u, it may seem cheap...but for a country like Portugal that the medium wage goes around 600€ it far too expensive....

i´m really thinking of converting my Ae86 to LPG...the price per liter is around 0.53€!.....i already got an mitsu Galant v6 converted..and im on the way of doing it to all my cars...

[NoHachi]

I'm sure they'll start taxing that whenever its popularity rises...enjoy while you can.

[Mux213]

NoHachi,

I think you got it all wrong. The more the goverment taxes fuels, the more they become dependend on the income of those fuel taxes the MORE the goverment will try to STOP or work AGAINST any company that wants to bring an alternative to the market.

You just mentioned LPG, people are starting to switch now that fuel prices are rising like crazy, because they are, the goverment is investigating ways to put more tax on LPG because they are loosing income. Eventually LPG will cost to much and people will switch back to diesel which is geting cleaner but still is one of the worst poluting fuels that we have.

Another example is electricity, a couple of years ago it paid to get environmentally friendly electricity, it was subsediced and countries like norway can export environmentally clean electricity (hydro electric stations aplenty over there) cheaply. People were switching to green power as it was as expensive as normal electricity.
The result was that the goverment was not making any more money because they only make alot of money from dirty poluting power stations here in the Netherlands. The cancelled the subsidies and raised import tax on the power coming in. Now dirty power is alot cheaper then green power and everyone is switching back to dirty power.

Biodiesel and such is another example where our brilliant goverment fears loosing money. Right now you can run most older diesel engines on vegetable based fuels and some even do that. Its twice as cheap as running it on diesel, it is 100% environmentally safe, but the goverment is doing their best to outlaw it until they find a way to tax it.

In that way, when we look at our neighboors, they are way ahead of us. They have much cheaper dirty fuels but still they are ahead of the game with clean fuels. Biodiesel is starting to become available at most gas stations in germany for instance.

The only way that taxing fuels to kickstart environmentally better fuels is if every penny of that tax goes into research and none goes to the goverment so the goverment does not have any loss when suddenly people switch to better fuels that they can not (and should not) tax.

[Ivan141]

Well, I'm not a great fan of the government..or their policy at the moment. But just pretending that I were, then your explanation is as one-sided as mine..
Your whole argument falls to pieces when you consider the possibility that the government isn't making profit from the taxes. For example because they have to pay heavy fines etc (and subsidise public transport).

But you have a real point when you say that the role of the government isn't always that of the independent outside reference that it should be...

(PS....It is I...LeClerc! [raises glasses in cunning disguise])

[Mux213]

Ivan or NoHachi?,

well offcourse, all the money the goverment 'earns' they spend, so they dont make a profit. The thing is, they are spending so much on the wrong things it is impossible for them to deal with a situation where their income suddenly disappears.

Just think of it, if tomorow everyone leaves there car at home and starts taking the bus (which is what the goverment claims they want) the goverment is in deep shit. They are suddenly faced with a heavily subsidiced public transport system without the income to support it.

I think that tax and subsidies are what makes progress impossible. The goverment should ask for a minimum of taxes and take care of lawenforcement, education, healthcare and a certain level of social security so people who really really need it get supported by the goverment.

When we then look at the subject of fuel we have to be carefull, it would suddenly become very cheap causing usage of fuel to skyrocket and enhance our problems. But this is not something to be corrected by tax. It is to be corrected by having oil companys pay for the hidden costs of using the fuel. We have to look at the polution caused by a certain type of fuel and ensure that the fuel will cost whatever it takes to reverse that polution. This will make dirty fuels very expensive, if even impossible to buy if there is no way to deal with the polution caused by them. It will also make clean fuels dead cheap.

But idealistic view I know, its almost utopic. But tax doesn't work because by using tax it means someone important has alot to loose when a better alternative is introduced.

[Ivan141]

Ghe ghe..Mux..I see the economical theory that you are trying to reference..but your argumentation is still somewhat sloppy.

Why would the oil company have to pay the tax? They just produce the stuff, how you use fuel further is totally your own buisiness (makes a great cleaning agent!). I would think that its much more fair that the guy who does the polluting (aka U) pays.
The impacts of the pollution influence our whole society. So I think it is reasonably fair that the government takes measures to prevent it, in the name of us collectively. They are usually also the ones who do/sponsor most of the clean up work etc.

Internalising the external car is so difficult that we'll not see progress in the coming years. Pollution and other impacts depend on a lot of factors, for example time of day, traffic volume (regarding for example noise), traffic state (congestion means cold catalyst aka more fumes, congestion also means people/buisinesses wasting time and time=money), route choice (some routes are below the pollution treshhold and could be made relatively cheaper etc) etc.

The weird thing is that the whole of the scientific community has come to an understanding regarding a driven-distance based taxation. Expect one of those GPS boxes in your car somewhere in the coming century. And I'll probably be making a lot of money designing related systems..Dont worry..I'll spend it on nice things.

[nmwisima]

Sorry for not having time to read all the things you re witing above,
but here in Greece gasoline is sold from

0.75 to 1,23 euros per LITRE!!!!

oNE YEAR LATER THE PRICE WASNT HIGHER THAN 0,55/LITRE...

Still sallarys are one of the LOWEST in EU

[Mux213]

Ivan,

Indeed, whether you tax the person or in some other way get the money so that using something environmentally dirty or use something in a more dirty way costs more then when someone uses something more clean.

The thing is, that would only work if that tax, or other form of money charged, is actually used to reduce the impact of those poluters or put into researching alternatives.

Right now this is not the case and that is what I am trying to point out. It doesn't matter HOW you get the extra money, it matters what that money is used for.

Aslong as road taxes are used to fund stupid projects that have nothing to do with making the environment better, or used to make stupid polititions make loads of money, things will not get better.

If tomorow Toyota (our favorite car brand) puts a fully electric car on the market that you can plug into your wall socket at night to charge, and drive endlessly the next day that would be the thing we want.

So people will start buying this car. The car probably will cost more then your average car but people will be spending the extra cash because they save alot of fuel costs.

As more people buy these cars, less people drive poluting cars.
As a result the goverment will stop the tax benefits on non poluting cars (right now you pay alot less BPM on the prius for instance), the goverment will start taxing electricity more, which doesn't only make these cars more expensive to own, they also put people's normal electricity bill through the roof, and before you know it, everyone is back driving their old diesel cars and has their own diesel generator in theback yard because its a hell of a lot cheaper to polute the world, then to save the environment.

The only way this is going to work is that the tax that is charged extra over poluting cars compared to clean cars is all poored back into doing other cool stuff for the environment so that at the point where the poluting cars are no longer sold, and the goverment no longer gets that extra income through the extra tax, they wont care because a goal has been reached and the extra money is no longer needed.

[Ivan141]

Mux, the damage your doing to the environment damages a lot of people. Some of them have never seen the inside of a car, some of them will die in the coming year, some are 4 years old etc etc. How would you find a way to satisfy all those people? By pumping more money into hybrid car subsidies? Remember the damage has already been done by you.
Nopes the money is redistributed amongst the whole population, quite honest in fact.

[Not saying I agree totally with the above, but it is a valid argument that they make.]