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Recently in my neck of the woods, the Green Party of Canada has been suggesting the addition of a straight-off 12 cents per litre tax on the price of gasoline. This is mainly positioned as a carbon tax to try and encourage the use of higher efficiency alternatives.
What's kind of promising is that there actually seems to be reasonable public support for the idea (although this appears largely anecdotal). Still, it's inevitable that they'll also be some serious criticism of this plan as well.
In any event, it got me thinking about how exactly (if enacted) would such a measure fare. Would the general public freak? Prices have already been going up and up, with outcry after outcry, but here it's unclear what a hike with a clear environmental perogative might provoke. So, how's about a mechanism of increase that coincides empirically with the results of global warming directly?
Something conceptually like this:
Generally speaking, the price of gasoline (in Canada) that is reliant on its volume as calculated at 15oC. This means that, technically, the volume of gas you actually get is likely not based on the "real" volume being delivered to your vehicle at your particular local temperature. Unfortunately, doing the math, a single degree (Celsius) change, only changes the volume by about 0.125% (which means the penalty suffered - i.e. you actually get less gas at higher temperatures if you base your pricing on volumes - is kind of minimal).
Still, aesthetically, maybe gaging the increase on overall temperature rise is a way to go? Of course, then there's the problem of taking weather events at specific points as indicators of global warming, and of course, what would be the baseline?
But (just for fun) how about something like using the industrial revolution average temperature as our baseline, and every degree above that represents a 100% increase in gas prices. That means, for instance, if we use the above hockey stick graph, we can enact a straight off 20% (for ~0.2C) increase, but if we are foolish enough to let temperatures rise even more (say to the feared 1-3C in the next 50 or so years), then you're talking a 100% to 300% increase in gas prices.
Crazy? Sure. But hey, at least here, there's an actual physical trend that folks can correlate their gas prices with - namely the increase in global temperatures.
Comments
A lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Rome, Georgia, charging that gas stations were selling gasoline at a higher temperature than the "official" temperature while buying gas at a lower temperature. Thus they were charging a higher sales tax per unit mass when selling than when buying.
Posted by: Mark P | June 12, 2007 10:33 AM