There’s a story on the BBC website and radio today about a plan to charge residents of Richmond (a suburb of London) for parking spaces according to the carbon emissions of their vehicles. I’m unsure about this as an idea generally – I’m a big fan of green taxes, I’m just not sure this is a good one – but the coverage contains a basic mistake that I’ve seen repeated several times since I got back to the UK.
A Lib Dem council in London wants owners of gas-guzzling vehicles to pay more to park outside their homes.
Richmond residents with high-emission cars could pay £750 a year, compared with £200 now, but the greenest cars would be exempt.
Whether a car ‘guzzles’ gas or not isn’t an isolated fact. A car’s pollution isn’t defined by how much it uses per mile, but how much it uses per day. A Hummer driven a mile per day guzzles less gas than a Prius driven 10 miles per day. Charging people based on their potential for pollution does less to discourage pollution than charges based on their actual pollution, and mischaracterizing this does us no favours.
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I see your point but to your point, one of the best ways to discourage wasteful use of power is to prevent the hummer from getting built in the first place. If people don’t buy them, they won’t have an opportunity to guzzle gas. And then the energy, in both a creative sense of the word and joules sense of the word, can be redirected toward making greener solutions. Don’t forget that a Hummer probably contains 10x the amount of plastic, glass and steel that a Smart, yet both will be used for much the same purpose 90% of the time. That should count for a lot.
You’re right, of course, and only laziness kept me from pointing that out in the original post. Something like 10% of the energy a car will use in its lifetime is consumed in its creation, and clearly that’s 10% of a lot more for a Hummer (all other things being equal).
Having said that, I’d much rather energy was focused on limiting use rather than what is being used. In the UK at least far too much of the cost of a vehicle are fixed, be they purchase taxes or yearly license/insurance/certification costs. The marginal cost of doing a mile becomes almost trivial in comparison. For example, I’m going to drive over 400 miles round trip tomorrow to collect the kids from their grandparents. I’d love to do that by train, because driving is boring, but even without the cost of getting to/from the train station it would cost me twice as much by rail as by road, because I’ve already paid all those fixed costs. I’d much rather have cars given away free in cereal boxes (well…) and petrol cost £50 a gallon (or whatever would balance the lost revenue). Making it a pain to park is a trivial detail in comparison.
Oh, and I should highlight that I wasn’t arguing against what you say, just that the BBC story was an over-simplification.