Rather than pay more taxes (since taxes are a hole where money disappears) I'd rather see us use a bit more common sense and actually work to reduce or redirect our energy consumption to less polluting forms of energy.
My angst as a liberal is my fellow liberals get too tied up in catch phrases and buzzwords- say "Nuclear power" to a liberal and they are immediately, and automatically, opposed on "safety" grounds, and their minds are so closed to the concept of nuclear power, and drilling for oil off our shore, that California gets the majority of its power needs from coal fired plants in the Midwest...here we are, the State that is screaming the most about global warming and greenhouse gasses, producing the most pollution. I would love to have politicians who educate themselvees then educate the electorate instead of this nonthinking, cliche spewing lazy a-holes we have in Sacramento now.
Oh, and solar power is a joke- it would take a solar panel grid the size of a football field to provide you with the power it takes to run that 52in. TV, hair dryers, microwaves etc. that we are accustomed to. Unless you like dim light and black and white 12 in. TVs forget about solar. Wind power is also a joke and wind generators are being built only because PG&E gets a HUGE tax break by putting them up. Hydroelectric is less and less a factor on our power consumption, too. We're decommissioning old dams without replacing them- try to build a new one (not that we could in today's economy) and the Sierra Club will injunction you to death.
No Lazs, I'm not willing to pay a penny more in energy taxes than I already do. I vote we continue to let this be market driven rather than subsidized- my PG&E bill, between my shop and my house, runs 600.00 a month, and there's already a bunch of taxes on it.
BTW- Who really uses the most gas anyway? The guy with the hot rod that gets driven once a month or the guy with the hybrid who commutes 200 miles every day? My pickup gets 12 miles per gallon, but my commute is slightly more than a mile so I use approximately a gallon of gas a week for my commute- how much gas does that guy burn who commutes from Elk Grove to San Francisco in his hybrid?