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If you are attempting to use fuel tax to solve traffic congestion there are a number of problems.

Fuel tax imposes a higher penalty on people driving long distances, often outside the cities, and these people have no effect on congestion (also very little measurable effect on pollution).

Fuel tax imposes a higher penalty on transport of goods, thus increasing supermarket prices, adding directly to CPI. Often these trucks will avoid peak periods anyhow for obvious reasons.

Fuel tax imposes a higher penalty on heavy machinery used by agriculture, mining, construction, demolition, etc. If you give rebates on any of this then you will get cries, "Oh, oh, the mining industry is subsidised, how can that happen?"

The real reason we are seeing a push for higher fuel tax is "because we can". While oil prices were high we got a good estimate that people will pay, and now it seems a terrible shame (for governments) to see those people not paying quite as much. Everything else is justification to fill in the back story and provide plausible sound bites for the nightly news.

Every litre of gasoline burned puts out about 3 kilos of CO2*. That is not a little effect on pollution. Unless, of course the above analysis ignores greenhouse gases.

*Gasoline is largely short chain hydrocarbons. The mass of these is dominated by the carbon content. A litre of gasoline is about 1 kilo. The atomic number of carbon is about that of oxygen (a little less, actually), so a CO2 molecule is about 3 times the weight of a carbon atom. None of this is exact, but it's only off by a few 10's of percents.

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