[onequestionwonder]

"A nation like the UK has the natural resources (North Sea) and economic/political leverage to sustain, in the medium term, the unsustainable consumption of the United State. What advantage is gained by an unusually high gas tax?"

Isn't North Sea depletion about 10% a year in UK North Sea fields?

The UK might be able to do it, but it sounds more short than medium term to me.

As to the advantage, well... all I can say is the earlier the UK begins to address this problem the better.

Also consumption denied can be sold on the world market for income.

[CARVER]

The advantage from high gas tax should be that we stop wasting the stuff. Hopefully people that 'need' a new car buy a hybrid instead of a Hummer, so that they can drive say 10 years in the hybrid instead of 1 year in the Hummer. High taxes seems to be the only way to get people to conserve gas/energy.

What I however do not get, is why there is not a lot more attention directed to why we have these high taxes and why we need to conserve and tell the people how they will benefit from it in the future. Conserving energy does not always have to mean 'doing less of ...', but just doing it differently so you can basically get the same result with less energy.

Maybe because by saying that the governments are telling us we should have listened to the things the green parties have been saying for a long time, the things they themselves have been opposing all those years. They probably don't want to shout: "We were wrong", and are searching for someone else to blame. It seems they have chosen OPEC. Their excuse now seems to be: We knew we would have to conserve some day, but not as soon as the green parties were saying, because OPEC told us they could increase production for a long time, so we were under the impression that there was still plenty of time to research and develop proper alternatives and make the transition. We demand from OPEC that they now do what they told us they would do: increase oil production. So don't blame us, blame OPEC for the high gas prices. We decided to become fully dependant on OPEC even though they would not give us any evidence of their claims that they could increase oil production, while lots of experts were shouting that they would not be able to do that. But you can't blame us for trusting them blindly on such an important matter and thus taking this increadibly huge risk. We take no responsibility whatsoever, OPEC is responsable for this mess. [Do you think they are buying it?]

[Xelat]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onequestionwonder', '"')A nation like the UK has the natural resources (North Sea) and economic/political leverage to sustain, in the medium term, the unsustainable consumption of the United State. What advantage is gained by an unusually high gas tax?"

Isn't North Sea depletion about 10% a year in UK North Sea fields?

The UK might be able to do it, but it sounds more short than medium term to me . . .

[Wildwell]

"The empirical results presented above suggest energy prices will have a relatively small but positive impact on the average price that consumers pay for food. The simulations suggest that a doubling of crude oil prices would raise average food prices in competitive food markets by as much as 1.82 percent in the short run, and by 0.27 percent in the long run."

The full report is here

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/TB1862/

Now the supermarkets are making billion in profits and can afford to absorb a lot of rises in any case, especially as they are in competition. Aren’t the threats of everything will rise in cost over exaggerated?

[Liamj]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wildwell', '"')The empirical results presented above suggest energy prices will have a relatively small but positive impact on the average price that consumers pay for food. The simulations suggest that a doubling of crude oil prices would raise average food prices in competitive food markets by as much as 1.82 percent in the short run, and by 0.27 percent in the long run."

The full report is here

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/TB1862/

Now the supermarkets are making billion in profits and can afford to absorb a lot of rises in any case, especially as they are in competition. Aren’t the threats of everything will rise in cost over exaggerated?

[rogerhb]

National wants to drop the petrol tax. They also want to reduce general taxation then borrow heavily to build more roads.

And today they are leading the polls, election on Saturday.

No problem that short-sightedness can't fix.

[Wildwell]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Liamj', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Wildwell', '"')The empirical results presented above suggest energy prices will have a relatively small but positive impact on the average price that consumers pay for food. The simulations suggest that a doubling of crude oil prices would raise average food prices in competitive food markets by as much as 1.82 percent in the short run, and by 0.27 percent in the long run."

The full report is here

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/TB1862/

Now the supermarkets are making billion in profits and can afford to absorb a lot of rises in any case, especially as they are in competition. Aren’t the threats of everything will rise in cost over exaggerated?

[Liamj]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('wildwell', 'T')hat's fuel itself, I still don't buy the argument that food prices will go through the roof when these companies are making billions and are in cut throat competition, not to say they won't in the future.

[WhistleWind]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')'m wondering if the UK should have gone the middle way on this, 10p off tax and a permanent 55mph speed limit on motorways. Save a lot of lives, fuel, and make road less competitive with alternatives.