May 21, 2004 - Sick of paying through the nose at the pumps? Blame the government - but maybe not for the reasons you think.
While Canadians certainly do pay a fair bit of tax on gasoline, the main reason why we spend so much on gas is because our vehicles burn so much of it. And if our federal government had had the foresight to improve gas mileage more than two decades ago when fuel-efficiency legislation was actually passed, our pocketbooks would be a lot heavier today. We'd be breathing easier too.
Gasoline - and other fossil fuels like coal and natural gas - should be expensive. They are non-renewable resources, so once they are gone, they are gone for good. Burning them also causes pollution and climate change - which have very high social and economic costs. If gas prices are so low that nobody thinks twice about buying gas-guzzling vehicles or living in far-flung suburbs, then society as a whole ends up paying because of increased health care costs from smog, sprawl and traffic accidents. And we run out of valuable fossil fuels much quicker.
But that doesn't mean driving our cars has to be a one-way trip to the poor house. Simply by making our cars more fuel efficient, we can save money on gas, make our fossil-fuel reserves last longer, improve our health and slow climate change.
Canadian legislation designed to increase the fuel efficiency of new vehicles, including SUVs, was passed by Parliament in 1982. But the auto industry lobbied hard and promised to improve fuel efficiency on its own, so government backed down. Did industry live up to its promise? Hardly. The average new vehicle sold today actually gets worse gas mileage than it did in 1980.
If the 1982 fuel-efficiency legislation had been enforced, we'd all be spending less on gasoline and the current spike in prices wouldn't seem so bad. Our air would be cleaner too. Right now air pollution kills thousands of people prematurely in Canada every year. And according to an article published recently in the journal
Science, air pollutants are dangerous not only to those living in polluted areas right now, but possibly for their next generation too.
Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton studied mice breathing air in an urban area of Hamilton and compared them with mice breathing filtered air. They found that mice breathing the polluted air suffered from far more genetic mutations, which were passed on to their offspring, than did those breathing the clean air. These findings are consistent with similar observations in other studies on mice and herring gulls in the area.
In 2001, MIT economist Paul Krugman warned North Americans that rampant oil consumption was one of the causes of instability in the Middle East and pointed out that further instability could lead to spikes in oil prices that would hit consumers hard. He argued that the best way to break free of this "oil-hog cycle" was to immediately begin strong conservation measures.
Well, almost three years later, our fossil fuel consumption has continued to climb and we are all paying the price. We've got rampant instability in the Middle East, big jumps in gas prices and worsening air pollution. What we need is smart leadership that has the foresight to legislate the changes that will improve our health and well-being, rather than continue to succumb to industry pressures.
In Europe and Japan, automakers have already agreed to improve fuel efficiency by 25 per cent. There's no good reason why the same automakers couldn't readily meet that target in North America. This measure alone would greatly help Canada meet the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, reduce air pollution and additionally save drivers hundreds of dollars in gas bills every year.
Canada's government should have acted more than 20 years ago to improve fuel efficiency. But rather than simply blame them, we need to encourage them act now so we don't waste another two decades.
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