Government could help us use less oil and save money

Friday, May 02, 2008 by Dave Winer.

McCain and Clinton propose a moratorium on Federal gasoline tax for the summer to give the "average American" a break. It must test well with focus groups, but it's meaningless, because the prices would immediately adjust. If you lower the price, people will take longer trips, drive instead of fly, increasing consumption, driving the price up. There might be a bit of a benefit to drivers for a very short period of time, but in the end it would be a wash. This is what economists say, and it makes sense. 

President Bush wants more exploration, and to build more refineries, these are medium to long-term things that likely wouldn't do anything for us right away.  

But wouldn't switching to smaller European style cars do more to ease the problem than increasing exploration or creating more refineries? 

And the money we'd give up for Federal gasoline tax could be better spent on putting high capacity network lines under our streets to increase communication. Some of the car trips must be to exchange information that coud be replaced by moving packets around at gigabit speeds. It wouldn't cost much to retrofit a few cities with really high speed lines, then we could get to work on developing the services that would make life more interesting, fun and efficient.