Has Friedman been listening to Car Talk?

Love em or hate em Thomas Friedman makes some good points about the new administration and the gas tax. In this NY Times article he discusses how far we have not come in regards to this tax. He are a few excerpts I liked:

Today’s financial crisis is Obama’s 9/11. The public is ready to be mobilized. Obama is coming in with enormous popularity. This is his best window of opportunity to impose a gas tax. And he could make it painless: offset the gas tax by lowering payroll taxes, or phase it in over two years at 10 cents a month. But if Obama, like Bush, wills the ends and not the means — wills a green economy without the price signals needed to change consumer behavior and drive innovation — he will fail.

The two most important rules about energy innovation are: 1) Price matters — when prices go up people change their habits. 2) You need a systemic approach. It makes no sense for Congress to pump $13.4 billion into bailing out Detroit — and demand that the auto companies use this cash to make more fuel-efficient cars — and then do nothing to shape consumer behavior with a gas tax so more Americans will want to buy those cars. As long as gas is cheap, people will go out and buy used S.U.V.’s and Hummers.

Will we ever find that magic bullet that will change the way we have been living our lives? Realistically cars are not going away any time soon but we need to start planning for a future that better integrates other modes of transit (bike, bus, lrt, rail, walking, skating, skiing, ect). Until then we continue to spin our wheels at the pump.