This is an editorial, right?
An interesting site which monitors the insane wet dream ramblings of the Jayson Blair types writing for the NY Slimes has another BS article of Mouawad. He wants us to be like the French with very high taxes on gas and energy.
Times Watch for October 5, 2004
Taking the High (Tax) Road to Energy Efficiency
A front-page Business Day story by Jad Mouawad shakes its head at America for being (according to the headline) a "Slow Learner on Energy-Efficiency Front."
Mouawad's Tuesday story begins with liberal-sounding snark: "The United States, land of gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s and air-conditioned McMansions, might do well to turn to the country some Americans love to hate for lessons on how to curb its reliance on imported oil: France."
Later Mouawad insists that federal speed limits are an example of America "taking the high road": "The contrast between French resolve and American abandon in recent years is sharp. The United States, too, took the high road in the 1970's and early 80's, when the combined impact of the 1973 oil embargo, the growing power of OPEC and the Iranian revolution of 1979 created long gas lines and raised the prospect of an oil producers' stranglehold over the American economy. The price of Arabian light crude rose from $1.85 a barrel in 1972 to $40 in 1981, or $80 in today's dollars. Americans responded with a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles an hour, a home-insulating boom and a blossoming of energy-technology start-ups to help businesses cut their energy bills."
Mouawad's "high road" seems to mean high taxes as well. Mouawad talks to unlabeled liberal "experts" who advocate them: "But with oil now at $50 a barrel, double what it was two years ago, and with many analysts expecting substantially higher energy prices in the next decade than during the 1990's, some experts are saying that both government and industry are going to need to do some fundamental rethinking of some basic policies. 'The lack of emphasis on demand in the past 20 years in the United States has a lot to do with the predicament we're in now,' said Ashok Gupta, an economist with the National Resources Defense Council. 'We need to look at what it will take to get manufacturers to offer technologies that people want.' One obvious step, which politicians are loath to even mention, would be to increase taxes on gasoline. Here again, the divergence between the United States and Europe is instructive. To encourage the use of mass-transit systems, and finance their development, European governments impose generally high taxes on gasoline. French drivers pay over $5 a gallon for gasoline, $3.75 of that in taxes, compared with $1.90 a gallon on average in the United States, with only 41 cents of that going to taxes."