RE: Oil Economics, a (long) thought experiment

From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 04 2003 - 15:25:30 MST

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    owner-extropians@extropy.org wrote:
    > Am Samstag, 1. Februar 2003 20:37 schrieb Rafal Smigrodzki:
    >> ### If gas costs .85 $/gallon, I can drive to visit my wife in
    >> Pittsburgh and still have money left to invest in a high-tech
    >> company. If you increase the cost of gas to 5 $/gallon, as in
    >> Europe, I won't be able to drive 700 miles a week,
    >
    > Pardon, but I assume that your real interest is not to buy oil/gas,
    > but to travel these 700 miles/week in a comfortable, self-determined
    > way, isn't it? So, the real problem is not the price of oil/gas, but
    > the missing alternatives to todays cars for transportation, which use
    > a) a large amount of b) oil/gas, which is c) neither unlimited nor d)
    > produced in an ideal free market.

    ### This is correct. The extreme technical difficulty of building a cheap,
    practical and efficient replacement for the internal combustion engine is
    indeed a major problem. However, this is not directly related to the issue
    of economical rationality of commodity taxes.

    ---------------

    >
    > I'd set on (a) first, and on developing (b) and (c), which would
    > probably solve (d) as a result (iff the b/c-solution doesn't produce
    > another single factor dependency).
    >
    ### I am sure there are thousands of capable engineers with hundreds of
    millions of dollars in research money, working on improving automotive
    efficiency, but so far they were largely unsuccessful. I hope that
    eventually we will have more efficient cars at reasonable prices, and I will
    be happy to buy one of them.

    Rafal



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