A Times Editorial

Lowering gas prices

The government could take the politically expedient way out by cutting the gas tax, but promoting fuel efficiency would be the most responsible way to go.

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 3, 2000

President Clinton, who knows better, sent a wrong signal when he said there would be nothing "inherently" remiss in reducing the federal gasoline tax if it led to lower prices at the pump. It's one of the worst things Congress could do, even if it were guaranteed that the oil companies would extend the savings to their customers.

If the oil companies are gouging the public, as their soaring profits might suggest, a tax cut would simply subsidize and encourage that misconduct. It would take the political heat off the companies to cut their profits and suggest to motorists that there is no need after all to conserve. This is hardly the way to correct a problem that began with a supply-and-demand imbalance, and to suggest that billions of dollars in forsaken taxes be thrown on that bonfire defines the outer limits of gall.

It would suit the oil lobby and its shills in Congress to blame the problem on taxes, federal regulations or the administration's modest influence on OPEC, but the real cause is that Americans have been bingeing on gasoline, and the government has been enabling them. It's time for self-restraint, not happy hour.

President Clinton's rash concession to cutting taxes obscured the sensible thoughts he had expressed earlier in the same news conference regarding energy efficiency, technological research and the folly of false hopes.

"... This present price crisis will begin to abate," he said. "But we will have fundamentally higher prices now that the rest of the world's economy has recovered and now that virtually all the OPEC members but Saudi Arabia are operating virtually at full capacity, until we make up our minds that we're going to drive higher-mileage vehicles and do other things that use less oil."

Gasoline has been so comparatively cheap in the United States that foreign visitors, accustomed to paying up to four times as much, have to be persuaded that our prices are quoted by the gallon instead of the liter. It still costs significantly less here than overseas, where taxes account for most of the difference.

As the Arab oil embargo faded from memory, Americans rekindled their affection for large, gas-guzzling cars. The 55 mph speed limit was scrapped though it demonstrably saved lives as well as energy. Congress left large loopholes in the law requiring automakers to manufacture energy-efficient vehicles. More and more people are driving so-called "light trucks," to which lower standards apply, as if they were passenger cars. The current corporate average fuel efficiency standard for "light trucks," a loose definition that hasn't been changed for two decades, is merely 20.7 mpg. The required fleet average for cars is 27.5 mpg. It would save 1-million barrels of oil a day, according to the Sierra Club, if all vehicles had to meet the higher average. Remember when the automakers said they couldn't make safer or more efficient cars? Forced to, they did. Congress has been blocking any move to increase fuel efficiency or redefine the standards, but it now looks as if that ugly rider will be missing from this year's Department of Transportation funding bill. Environmentalists won a showdown in the Senate, evoking an offer from the auto lobbies for a joint study by the DOT and National Academy of Sciences. The DOT would be free to recommend new standards after July 1, 2000, and to put them into effect three months later. This noticeably postpones any actual reform until there's a new president, so it's not a given that the standards will improve. But it's better than the status quo, and it's something else for voters to think about when they decide who that new president should be.

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