Duh!

David Owen, writing in this week's New Yorker, has pointed out almost in passing something that mildly distresses me for not having thought of, but that should deeply shame various policymakers -- alas of a Democratic stripe -- and environmental advocates:

The popular answer—switch to hybrids—leaves the fundamental problem unaddressed. Increasing the fuel efficiency of a car is mathematically indistinguishable from lowering the price of its fuel; it’s just fiddling with the other side of the equation. If doubling the cost of gas gives drivers an environmentally valuable incentive to drive less—the recent oil-price spike pushed down consumption and vehicle miles travelled, stimulated investment in renewable energy, increased public transit ridership, and killed the Hummer—then doubling the efficiency of cars makes that incentive disappear. Getting more miles to the gallon is of no benefit to the environment if it leads to an increase in driving—and the response of drivers to decreases in the cost of driving is to drive more.

Oops!

You, personally, may have bought that Prius because you wanted to be gentler on the environment, and also, perhaps, because you wanted to point the way to others. "Why can't we all just drive less wasteful cars?", you might have asked yourself and like-minded friends. How dreary and embarassing to realize, then, that the whole lower-mileage thing is, in the aggregate, useless. Yes of course you yourself do not succumb to the vulgar temptation to make unnecessary trips, increase the length of your commute, or just drive around because the miles you drive don't cost as much. But dammit, statistically that's what people do.

Of course as fuel costs rise so will fuel efficiencies. But, folks, we've got monumental problems with environmental degradation that's primarily caused by too many people having built too much driving into each day. For starters, let's just tax gas back to the Stone Age, so that we won't find ourselves there.