By Howard Whiteman
Murray State University
“Is this vehicle a hybrid?” the nice young lady at the county clerk’s office asked me. I’m sure my eyebrows perked as I had never been asked that before. “Yes it is” I replied, and then inquired why that mattered.
Turns out the Tennessee state legislature, starting January 1, had increased the registration fees for hybrids ($100) and electric vehicles ($200). They apparently did so because these vehicles use less or no gasoline, and that means those of us that drive such vehicles are not being taxed as much every time we fill our tanks. Those gas taxes, in turn, are used to help build roads and bridges. So, Tennessee has decided that even though I have a hybrid to help the environment and reduce my carbon footprint, that is not the environment they most want to help. They want to help build roads and bridges. Kentucky did a similar thing this year, but less pricey: $60 for hybrids, and $120 for EVs.
Don’t get me wrong; I am willing to do my part and help maintain our infrastructure. That $100 fee is still a bargain compared to the gas taxes that an SUV or pickup-owning person pays each year. My 10-year old Prius gets 43 mpg driving to work and back. But there is a bigger picture point here that is worth considering, one that goes far beyond my extra registration fees.
Taxes and fees are everywhere, but some make more sense from an environmental perspective than others. Gas taxes that pay for roads and bridges lead to legislatures wanting more gas to be consumed, so taxes go up, so they have more money for roads and bridges. Makes sense, except that as gas consumption goes up, so does carbon dioxide and other pollutants. New roads are a benefit to society, but there is also a cost that the legislature is not taking into account.
Instead of using the gas tax for roads and bridges, we could use those funds to help alleviate the impacts of climate change, by providing that money as incentives, rather than fees, for those of us that want to switch to hybrid and electric cars, or to fit our homes with solar panels, or to promote other clean-energy technology, like wind farms. Then we are taxing for nature, rather than against her. We would still need to pay for roads and bridges, but we should do that with other taxes that are not incentivized by consumption of fossil fuels.
The federal government has considered this sort of carbon tax for a while, and it’s long overdue. Many European countries have used it to help reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.
Whether we like it or not, at some point we are all going to have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. Additionally, some fossil fuels are in ecologically sensitive areas, like coastal Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachians. Other reserves are in places where we have spent way too much time at war, often to maintain access to those resources.
There is one energy source that is functionally limitless and safe: the sun. Every day, the sun shines an immense amount of energy on our planet which we can harvest through solar and wind technologies. The sun doesn’t shine equally everywhere, for sure, but neither does oil sit underneath everyone’s house. We have to transition from a society that carts gasoline around in big trucks to one that can efficiently move cleaner forms of stored energy, like electricity, from one part of the country to the next.
That brings up a current issue with electric cars, no pun intended. Electric cars pollute less individually, but the majority of that electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels at a power plant. We really haven’t solved the energy problem, we have just played a bit of a shell game with it.
I’ve always been a fan of hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells are used by a variety of large cities across the world to cleanly fuel their public transportation, and fuel cell vehicles for personal use are on the horizon.
There are two wonderful things about hydrogen as a fuel source. First, fuel cells mix hydrogen with oxygen, and in the process strip electrons that can power a motor. What happens when we mix hydrogen and oxygen? You get water, H2O. Yes, you read that correctly—the waste product that comes out of a hydrogen fuel-cell tailpipe is water vapor, not carbon monoxide. Imagine what that exhaust is like in comparison with today’s gasoline powered engines.
The second wonderful thing is that we can store and sell hydrogen similar to gasoline, and you can fill your tank with it a lot quicker than charging an electric vehicle. We could spend some of our gas tax money to retrofit our service stations with a tank just for hydrogen vehicles, and create hydrogen on site using water and electricity—which would hopefully come from wind or solar.
There is always going to be a problem creating the fuel, and it will cost water, some of which we can recycle. But by keeping hydrogen for sale just like we do for gasoline, consumers can transition to this cleaner fuel, service stations can stay in business, and even “Big Oil” can use this as a way shift from fossil fuels to a hydrogen economy. Indeed, they could transport hydrogen, rather than gasoline, in fuel cell powered trucks from renovated oil refineries that have been transformed using solar and wind energy to produce hydrogen for the world. We could even export it to other countries. It’s a soft landing for everyone.
All of that might sound too good to be true, and maybe it is. But it can work, if we have the political and economic will to make it happen, and maybe a carbon tax to prime the pump.
Until that day, I’ll keep paying my extra registration fees, and driving my hybrid to help the environment in my own way. But in a year like this one, I’ll also be doing my best to elect government officials, both state and federally, that will rethink energy and taxes for rather than against nature.
Dr. Howard Whiteman is the Commonwealth Endowed Chair of Environmental Studies and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Murray State University.