fuel prices

[Mux213]

NoHachi,

I think you got it all wrong. The more the goverment taxes fuels, the more they become dependend on the income of those fuel taxes the MORE the goverment will try to STOP or work AGAINST any company that wants to bring an alternative to the market.

You just mentioned LPG, people are starting to switch now that fuel prices are rising like crazy, because they are, the goverment is investigating ways to put more tax on LPG because they are loosing income. Eventually LPG will cost to much and people will switch back to diesel which is geting cleaner but still is one of the worst poluting fuels that we have.

Another example is electricity, a couple of years ago it paid to get environmentally friendly electricity, it was subsediced and countries like norway can export environmentally clean electricity (hydro electric stations aplenty over there) cheaply. People were switching to green power as it was as expensive as normal electricity.
The result was that the goverment was not making any more money because they only make alot of money from dirty poluting power stations here in the Netherlands. The cancelled the subsidies and raised import tax on the power coming in. Now dirty power is alot cheaper then green power and everyone is switching back to dirty power.

Biodiesel and such is another example where our brilliant goverment fears loosing money. Right now you can run most older diesel engines on vegetable based fuels and some even do that. Its twice as cheap as running it on diesel, it is 100% environmentally safe, but the goverment is doing their best to outlaw it until they find a way to tax it.

In that way, when we look at our neighboors, they are way ahead of us. They have much cheaper dirty fuels but still they are ahead of the game with clean fuels. Biodiesel is starting to become available at most gas stations in germany for instance.

The only way that taxing fuels to kickstart environmentally better fuels is if every penny of that tax goes into research and none goes to the goverment so the goverment does not have any loss when suddenly people switch to better fuels that they can not (and should not) tax.