Lol without all the subsidies gas would be $12/gallon. And burning fossil fuels (40% is automotive) kills more than 250,000 Americans per year. Whats the cost of a human life brah?
That depends on if grandma is being evaluated by an Obama Death Panel (life is precious and invaluable) or by the stock market in 2020 (she has, what, a couple years left anyway, let her die).
In the US there is only one metric: Dow Jones death panel. The insanity of our culture is that Obama Death Panels were an invention of the Dow Jones death panel board to rally the lemming brained right against the concept of public healthcare (the horror!). Oh yeah, obligatory fuck Joe Lieberman.
Exactly I am not getting all this subsidy unfairness nonsense that stops Chinese firms from selling cars here. The only difference I'm seeing is that we're subsidizing cars on the back end through oil subsidies, and they are subsidizing cars on the front end with production subsidies.
When the oil industry doesn't have to pay to clean up their externalities we already don't have a free market. You break it you pay. Fixing the externalities by incentivizing better technology is at minimum a correction to the market.
That argument can be made about the tax incentives.
However, regulations about emissions are intrinsically something we want, and we shouldn't hold back on that just because gas cars can't get to the level of emissions we need.