Damn straight its why. In France, a whopping 70% of the price of gas is taxes.
On average, europeans pay over 2xs higher gas prices than US drivers do. Their governments claim its to reduce the amount of energy consumption, buts its just a big part of how they bankroll their failing socialist utopias. On top of that, they’ve instituted a cap and trade program which since its inception has only raised the prices of energy, while Co2 output has actually not decreased, but increased. Awesome job there Europe.
And the usual suspects are pushing for it here as well.
Listen no further than the comments from that idiot limousine liberal, Diane Sawyer
Talking to Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, about Obama’s plans for increased fuel standards, she began, “Why not just go to a gas tax, for instance, which would accomplish a reduction in the use of gasoline, dependence on foreign oil right away?”
“If you really want to change the fuel patterns of this country, and if you want to reduce dependence on foreign oil, not by 2015 or 2016, but right now, there is one way to do it. It’s the way Europe has been doing it. And that is a gasoline tax.”
Sawyer would proceed to ask variations on this question six times.
I believe gasoline is almost three times higher. In Germany, energy is three times the cost here. Germany is the Democrat model. They want us to behave like Germans.
I hear lefties whine all the time about energy. They insist that we would have well developed alternative energy sources if we had thrown huge subsidies at alternative energy and substantially increased gas taxes in 1980s. Their assertion is strongly contradicted by the European experience. Europe has not found petroleum substitutes although their usage of diesel vehicles looks promising. However, the left has blocked diesel vehicles here. France has a major committment to nuclear power, another forbidden energy source of the left.
Europe is a good model for bad energy policy. The Democrats however want to take the worst of European energy policies and make the policies even worse here. I see an energy meltdown here. The Democrats are forcing energy boondoggles (ethanol, renewables, electric vehicles, residential solar, ...) and restricting economically viable energy production. The environmental left can and will stop new power plants.