How will higher mileage standards for passenger vehicles move more freight by rail instead of truck? How do they cause farmers, miners or contractors to use less diesel fuel? The answer is that they won’t. That is why such standards are a third-rate measure to reduce energy use or pollution.
There are myriad changes a society can make that reduce fossil-fuel use.
Farmers might use different tillage implements or ensile corn rather than dry it. A delivery service might re-order its routes or schedules. An earthmoving contractor might rip less rock with a bulldozer and instead drill and blast more. Or it might use scrapers rather than dump trucks on more hauls. A mine might move rock via a conveyor belt where it now uses trucks. FedEx or UPS might put more trailers on trains than they do now.
More grain would move through Duluth or down the Mississippi rather than by rail. Grain could be loaded on railcars closer to farms, rather than be trucked to more distant terminals. New concrete plants could be built where the sand and gravel can arrive by train or barge rather than truck.
Not all changes would be sweeping. Trains would not completely replace trucks, for example. Savings would come from one marginal adjustment here, another there. Before the fact, no one could identify all the changes that would take place. Humans are ingenious in responding to incentives.
Mandates provide few economy-wide incentives. That is why they are so popular with gutless politicians. They allow us to maintain the collective self-delusion that we can reduce energy use and emissions with no one other than evil auto manufacturers having to face challenging tradeoffs.
Every presidential candidate apparently supports higher mileage standards for passenger vehicles. But such standards change nothing in farming, nothing in earthmoving or mining, nothing in forestry, nothing in parcel delivery. They don’t shift the balance between trucks, trains and barges.
The fuel saved by moving freight with steel wheels on steel rails versus rubber tires on concrete roads is tremendous. But fuel is not the only factor when businesses choose a mode of transportation. Convenience, transit time and the costs of transshipping from one mode to another all enter into the decision.
The best way to motivate reduced fuel use is to increase the price. A tax on fuel to make its price reflect its true cost to society is the simplest way of doing that. Such a tax would do more to reduce energy imports or harmful emissions at lower costs than any alternative.
Taxes on fuels or emissions are not perfect. But they are so much better than the options we are choosing, that our shunning of this option is a national tragedy. We and our children will be poorer as a result.
© 2007 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.