Gas tax: a toxic debate

This month's Car and Driver magazine, of all places, asks a question that I think I can answer.

"Please," it says, "can't we even discuss a gasoline tax without somebody calling somebody an America-hating socialist?"

And the answer is ... No. We can't.

"You are just another unconscionable liberal who would take us back to the Stone Ages," a reader wrote to me last week after I brought up the treasonous notion of raising taxes on gas.

"I highly detest people like you thinking you know better than I do how I should live!" wrote another.

"It is a good thing people with your mind-set were not counted on to build this country," said another.

There's more, but you get the gist. It's as if I'd ordered my comrades, formerly known as Americans, to herewith go to and fro across our land of plenty only in horse-drawn wagons.

What I'd actually said was we should gradually raise the federal tax on gas by a penny per month, for 10 years. It's a way to use less oil over time, to jump-start alternative energy and to raise money to start paying down the ballooning federal debt.

Those commies at Car and Driver magazine have a motorhead reason for liking the idea. They say it would lead to better cars.

Car companies now are loath to endure years of development risk to make super-efficient cars, unless future gas prices are sure to be high enough that people will buy the cars.

"A fuel tax would help instill that confidence," writes the magazine. "And if enough people still want Lincoln Navigators, Ford could still build them."

See? Freedom-loving Americans can still drive whatever they want (like me and my belching old Volvo). We'd just have to pay closer to the true cost for the privilege.

"We suffer because a gasoline tax is conversational cyanide in our capital," the magazine concludes.

There was another round of talk going around last week that had me reaching for the cyanide.

"Extreme Greenies!" began a memo from one Sarah Palin to America's environmentalists.

"Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas," Palin wrote on her Facebook page.

"It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it."

So the Gulf oil spill is the environmentalists' fault.

After I wrote about the spill, I got dozens of letters and calls from readers repeating this theme. That it was somehow the muscle-bound environmentalists who had bullied those weaklings at British Petroleum into drilling 40 miles out to sea.

It will be news to hippies everywhere that they have been in charge of U.S. oil-drilling policy all these years.

Here are a few inconvenient truths about drilling in the Gulf, from the federal government's oil leasing website (www.gomr.mms.gov). Currently there are only 25 active deep-water drilling rigs. And there are 3,380 active shallow-water rigs (defined as being in 0 to 200 meters of water).

"Now do you get it?" Palin tweeted.

I don't get it. I don't see how a hundredfold more drilling rigs in shallow water than deep water shows environmentalists have "locked up" much of anything.

I don't get how the oil industry can trash our beaches, wetlands and waterways on this vast a scale, yet if you suggest we might want to cut back on the oil, then you are the one messing with how others live.

I don't get why when I write that we should start paying our bills — for wars we wage or medicines we take or the planet we trash — I get branded a leftist kook. I thought paying your way was conservative. Isn't it conservative to conserve?

Oh, there's a lot more I don't get. Like why Obama or even the Republicans aren't looking at those oil-drenched birds and figuring out ways for this country to at least start easing off our oil jag. It seems like it will be right back to "drill, baby, drill."

But what I really don't want to get is: To what even-deeper water are we headed if this is what passes for political debate.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.