CLOBBERING GASOLINE CONSUMERS

The U.S. petroleum industry should shift strategy in the runaway politics of gasoline. Technical and economic arguments don't seem to work. If they did work, lawmakers wouldn't be stampeding toward a Clean Air Act gasoline recipe that will further enrich corn farmers and distillers and probably aggravate pollution. And if the arguments worked, Congress wouldn't even consider raising the gasoline excise.

But Congress functions in tidy compartments. Issues emerge from discrete, unassailable principles, and lawmakers flit from one to the next like television viewers scanning channels: clean air, the budget deficit, child care. Lawmakers fight urban smog with inappropriate gasoline formulas that would raise retail prices by 10-25/gal then, without blinking, ponder a 50/gal or so gasoline tax hike to fight the deficit and cut petroleum demand.

GASOLINE CONSUMERS HURT

Does anyone see a connection here? Gasoline consumers should. They're about to get clobbered at the pump by their elected officials. And they're not supposed to resist because the blows come for the holy sake of environmentalism and budgetary balance.

Neither principle will profit in proportion to the cost. Excessively oxygenated gasoline will reduce carbon monoxide emissions-an isolated and shrinking problem-and worsen more-troublesome ozone pollution. And who believes that Congress-after discouraging vehicle fuel consumption and more than doubling the costs of its ethanol subsidy to $1.2 billion/year-will use leftover gasoline tax hike proceeds to pay off debt? The money more likely will find its way to something like subsidized child care. The country, after all, has millions of hard-pressed working parents who vote but do not grow or distill corn. Once Congress finishes with gasoline and the economic consequences show up at service stations and grocery shelves, working parents, too, will need something from the government sugar barrel.

All this should suggest the petroleum industry's new strategy. It incorporates a once unassailable principle now neglected: consumerism. No amount of enviro-congressional high-mindedness can significantly diminish the American need for transportation fuel. People depend on gasoline. And all mandated substitutes, cleaner or otherwise, raise transportation costs painfully. In the clean air issue, industry's technological and economic arguments apparently won't prevail over the commercial interests of corn. Maybe a strategy based on consumerism will work in the looming fight over gasoline taxes.

INDUSTRY TAX SUPPORT

But there's a problem. Some support for a higher gasoline excise comes from industry itself. Supporters consider the budget deficit a crisis demanding sacrifice. They say the government can limit the pain by raising taxes on a widely used product in a period of moderate price. Their argument makes sense as far as it goes. And it might convert others in industry if lawmakers propose a gasoline tax hike along with a capital gains rate cut.

That would be a shame. The gasoline tax hike argument ignores the uneven way the added burden would fall. Motorists in the West would hurt more than mass transit patrons in the East; the auto-dependent poor would suffer most. Furthermore, gasoline tax hike supporters forget the likely disconnection between dollars available to Congress and deficit reduction. And when oil companies support a higher gasoline levy now they fall into the congressional trap of attending to noisy issues in isolation while neglecting quiet but related ones. The petroleum industry shouldn't treat its consumers that way. And it shouldn't let Congress do so without a fight.