Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

Mr. Lerner misses one huge point in his otherwise insightful discussion on NGVs and that is the part that "corrective taxes" (or Piguvian taxes) should pay in advancing Americans toward rapidly adopting alternative source vehicles and other alternative transportation. We don't pay, at the pump, anywhere near what it costs society for us to burn gasoline and diesel in our daily driving. Our 18.4 federal gasoline tax today is about what our great grandparents paid in the 1920s against income. Overall, Americans still pay the second lowest prices for gasoline in the OECD nations, behind only Mexico, a major exporter of oil while we import better than half of what we use in our 251 million cars and trucks. The Victoria Transportation Policy Institute calculates society pays 54 cents for each of the 2.9 trillion miles Americans drive annually and a decade-old calculation, excluding such concepts as the cost of greenhouse emissions and to fight wars in oil fields, found that we should be paying $10.02 in additional gasoline taxes. Another small point that Mr. Lerner misses is the cost and difficulty of using Natural Gas here in America. The next time he's in Dehli he should take an NGV autorickshaw to where they are fueled. The line is easily 3/4 of a mile long and the lost productivity those drivers face while waiting, sometimes all afternoon, to fuel up must be massive. Few Americans can imagine waiting one-20th as long to fill up, especially on a long trip, which is one reason neither eCars nor NGVs are flying out of showrooms today. To build the kind of infrastructure to support any fuel change, America needs a higher gasoline tax because we need drivers, who calculate their personal cost based almost solely on those huge neon numbers alongside the highway, to have an incentive to consider alternative vehicles and transportation. And we need to educate that, for example, U.S. taxpayers keep carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf to ensure oil supply and that we send daily $1 billion overseas to import auto fuel, the largest single item in our trade deficit. Please do not read this as a condemnation of NGVs (or electrics either). Both have their place in a more rational transportation system but the biggest issue is that Americans pay too little for gasoline, not -- as polticians and mainstream media today imply -- too much.