courant.com | Gas Tax Moratorium Questioned: "Connecticut has already laid out its goals for energy and environmental policy: cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce reliance on foreign oil and expand the use of public transit.
If it cheats on those goals for the next three months, so what?
With gas prices near a record high, Republican legislators announced a plan last week to suspend the state's gasoline tax of 25 cents a gallon from Memorial Day to Labor Day. A vote on the proposal is expected soon. ...
'There is a direct relationship between gas prices and demand for gasoline,' said Robert Puentes, a fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University, agreed, but said a gas tax moratorium of just three months would change consumption by only a small percentage.
'If we tried, we may not be able to measure a consumer response,' Stavins said.
Twenty years ago, people reacted more strongly to price changes, but that's different today in part because people have higher incomes, said Kenneth Small of the University of California at Irvine, who has studied the relationship between gas prices and consumption.
Environmentalists say making gas cheaper runs counter to Connecticut's stated policies to reduce fossil fuel use and to get more people on buses, bicycles and trains.
"It is a pro-global-warming move," said Gordon T. Geballe, associate dean at Yale University's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
"Everyone is doing the opposite."
Don Strait, executive director for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, said: "There needs to be price signals that encourage people to do the right thing. Keeping the price of gasoline artificially low is moving in the opposite direction. ..."
