When studying this article on the reg the following occurred to me. Governments throughout the developed world, including our own, are demonstrating their green credentials by raising taxes on cars. This is effectively useless. Motorists do not design cars. They may have a choice about the kind of cars they buy but ultimately this choice is more limited than one may imagine. e.g. families that need people carriers will buy the most comfortable and safest one they can afford. So all these taxes do is raise taxation revenues for governments that, like our own, want a financial fillip during an worldwide economic downturn. If they REALLY wanted to reduce dependence on fossil fuels they’d lower the taxes to motorists but levy additional and steep carbon taxes directly on the companies that produce the fuels themselves. A brief glance of the world’s largest companies as evaluated by Forbes magazine shows that oil companies dominate the top 10. It’s only when we have worldwide agreements which endanger their profits that they’ll collectively engage in the research required to make a jump from fossil fuels within 5 years. There should be a taxation reduction for any company that achieves this new technology and further tax deductions for sharing it with others at reasonable prices. We need to incentivise positive change.
I know it’s an uncomfortable analogy but the manhattan project produced a bomb and the prospect of cheap nuclear power because they absolutely had to. They feared for the future of the free world and whatever we may feel about their motives or justifications it was a great piece of science and engineering. So rather than attacking the middle class taxpayers, an easy target in all developed countries, we should be forcing the oil companies to create the scientific and engineering breakthrough required for future trading.
Instead we’ve muppets like Ken Livingstone attacking SUV drivers in London as if they were contributing a globally significant amount of CO2-e to the problem.