Doubtful questions about global warming and the severity of local air quality problems tend not to emerge from the governments of developed nations. There is a reason for this. It has to do with money.
Science has raised more doubts about current global warming theories than global warming does about the future of planet Earth. And in many industrialized countries local air pollution is diminishing as motor vehicles gain efficiency and fuels become cleaner. Yet politics treats these issues as an all embracing crisis, in the thrall of which it seems only prudent for government to discourage driving.
THE GOVERNMENT ROLE
But why government? One answer is that some people welcome the state's iron hand in these matters. They are the people who, convinced that motor vehicles' threaten the world, feel horrible guilt about driving. A solution suggests itself: These folks might just say no to the urge to drive. But no, it is in the nature of things that the guilt laden want everyone else to join their expiation. The masses may doubt that the ice caps will melt if Mom drives Junior to school when it rains. But what do the guiltless masses know? It is also in the nature of things that when the few who know best set out to change behavior of the many, government gets the call.
Besides, governments want the job. Saving the planet is a cause made in heaven for politicians. This is partly why discouraging energy consumption, especially driving, has become a ritual quest of governance.
It is not, however, the main reason. The principal means of discouraging energy consumption and driving is taxation. Financially desperate governments that have trouble raising general taxes sometimes find easier going with levies said to discourage environmentally scorned activities. For this reason, hard questions about global warming and air quality problems tend to come not from governments but from taxpayers. Such questions explain the difference between the antioil energy tax U.S. President Bill Clinton proposed last year and the cents per gallon fuel taxes Congress passed.
The government of U.K. Prime Minister John Major learned nothing from this and is preaching planetary salvation en route to taxpayers' wallets. The budget announced last November raises gasoline and diesel taxes by 8 10% all in the interest of discouraging driving and saving the planet. The fuel taxes will rise by at least 5% more than the inflation rate in subsequent years. According to the U.K. Department of Energy, they will make Britons drive only when necessary, which will certainly comfort anyone fearful that the U.K. was becoming a land of wanton joyriders.
And the money? To the U.K. treasury, of course. Better to put it there than let it go to waste in the hands of the people who earned it. They'd probably just go for drives to the moors and raise air temperatures.
STRING OF SCANDALS
All this comes to pass amid a string of scandals involving British politicians, some of them fellow Tories of the prime minister. It also comes about as the British economy struggles through the first months of recovery from deep recession. Politically and economically, the timing for a large tax increase could not be worse. But it's not the money of course. Mostly, the government just wants to save the planet.
Could there be a subtle political motive at work here? British voters have reason to be disgusted by politicians who seem to have been partying while the nation suffered. They have scientific reasons to doubt the environmentalist rationale for the fuel taxes. But if they can't afford to drive to the polls in the next elections, they can't vote for Labour candidates, who otherwise face their best opportunity in a long time of reclaiming the U.K. government.
Copyright 1994 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
