Since then, the oil cartel is broken, the air is cleaner, and gasoline is cheap and plentiful. Recently, there was an article in the New York Times saying that large cars and high-speed driving are back in fashion, especially in states like Texas. Yes, that is a backward trend. And that's why I believe we must tax those resources. If we had a tax on gasoline like they have in Europe, people would not want to buy gas- guzzling cars.
Market forces work very well.
Those forces produced energy-efficient cars and refrigerators in the past, made people conserve, and thus, the price of energy fell. But in the long run, we have to increase energy-efficiency by a factor of 4 to 10 times. It's not that we're telling people we don't want them to have certain things, just that we want their needs met in a way that uses less for more. You cannot keep doing this on a worldwide basis. Well, in the U.S., and in most other places, there is this notion that the good life is the spending life.