The price of gas in America

[Weltall]

$2.47.

Financial incentives are required to push people to care.

Agreed, but progressive incentives are better than punitive incentives any day. What good is it to inflate gas prices when no viable alternatives exist?

One reason we don't have high-speed commuter trains like Japan is because the United States is twenty-five times as large as Japan. HSCTs are perfect for Japan because there is a large population condensed into a relatively small area--not so much for a nation with our large size and relatively sparse population. It would be a good idea to implement around our large population centers, but this is, by any reasonable measure, a solution which solves only a small part of the problem.

The incentive should, instead of punishing people with high gas prices, be to accelerate development of alternate technologies, and make them as inexpensive as possible, as quickly as possible. Thrift is what drives technology. You can look at any consumer technology or industry, anywhere, that has seen large success: it doesn't happen until the technology becomes affordable. A fantastic example exists with the automobile himself, and Henry Ford lowballing the price of his own product so that everyone could afford a Ford.

Raising gas prices artificially hurts the economy, and a poor economy is less able to bear the burden of technology development. The only thing such a move would accomplish is burdening us with the need for hydrocarbons longer than would otherwise be the case. It would also cause huge damage to millions of people for whom public transportation is, even if applied to its ideals, wholly impractical. It would also have a negative ripple effect to every level of industry and commerce, driving up prices as we saw two years ago when the consumer cost index grew steadily out of our favor for a while.

I can't conceive of a worse idea than inflating gas prices. There is literally nothing positive that can result from it.