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