Gas is too cheap
Readers of this blog are likely aware that oil is really cheap right now. While in July 2008, the U.S. benchmark price peaked at just above $140 a barrel, its price dipped to below $27 in mid-January.
The internet is on fire telling us that oil is now cheaper than the barrel (it actually doesn’t) come(s) in, the equivalent volume of Perrier sparkling water or Coca Cola. But there is a much more frightening comparison. The national average price for gasoline is $1.80 this week, with a minimum of $1.29 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The external costs for a gallon of gasoline, as estimated in a now classic paper, are approximately $2 per gallon. This means that the average American is currently purchasing gasoline at half of its true social cost.
Now, higher oil price won’t fix the external costs of course and we have argued ad nauseum for a carbon tax on this blog to fix one of the market failures. Michael Anderson and I have a nice paper suggesting that one would need to charge a gas tax somewhere significantly north of $2 to make drivers internalize all of the external costs you spew on your fellow citizens faces while hurling your Dodge Hellcat down I-80 at rush hour.
But low gas prices have all kinds of negative effects for a society that does not properly tax gas. People drive more and hence cause more congestion. People purchase less fuel efficient cars, since they think gas prices will always stay where they are any given day, which is rational. (What is not, is that folks buy more convertibles on sunny days.) So we drive our bigger cars more on a road network that is falling apart. Bridges and highways are in terrible condition, as has been documented widely.
The smartest energy economist I know and Energy Institute colleague, Severin Borenstein, has suggested a perceived outrageous solution to this problem a while back. A price floor for gasoline. Stop the presses! A neoclassical economist suggests a price floor. My version of the idea goes like this. If the price of oil drops below a certain price, say $70 per barrel, gas prices get frozen at the average local historical price for $70 oil. Yes, we would keep gas prices artificially high. This would discourage consumers from driving more and maintain disincentives to purchase really fuel inefficient cars.
But what to do with the profits? Give it to refiners? Oil companies. No. The idea is for the regulator to capture this windfall and use it to put our highway system back together or improve public transportation systems. You are shaking your head. Well, the Chinese are not. In the first week of January, the National Development and Reform Commission (which is China’s economic planning agency) announced that price of Diesel and Gasoline would not be lowered as long as the price of oil is below $40.
This is a big deal. China had 279 million registered cars in 2015. In the US this number is 257.9 million. Due to regulatory controls, the market for gasoline is less complex in China than the fragmented US market. So how one would calculate the exact floor by region would be subject to lengthy regulatory processes. Still, the basic economics are right. While I agree that the tightened CAFE standards will improve fuel efficiency, they will not generate revenues that will prevent our then smaller and lighter cars from falling in to giant size potholes. Let’s get on it.
Categories
Maximilian Auffhammer View All
Maximilian Auffhammer is the George Pardee Professor of International Sustainable Development at the University of California Berkeley. His fields of expertise are environmental and energy economics, with a specific focus on the impacts and regulation of climate change and air pollution.
Energy Institute Blog 
It is not proper to cite the RFF paper as support for the assertion that there is a $2/gallon external cost of gasoline. The authors calculated the external cost of automobiles, not of gas. Most of the cost was for traffic congestion and accidents, which are results of personal mobility, regardless of fuel. They put the fuel related external cost at 18 cents/gallon. Of that, only 6 cents/gallon was for “greenhouse warming.” The paper doesn’t support a carbon tax of meaningful size.
I never made the assertion that this is the greenhouse gas externality. The text is careful about this. This is the total externality.
But Max, he’s correct that much of the externality is from “cars” and not from “fuel.” They don’t go away with EVs. Researchers have been making this mistake for a couple of decades.
I get that clearly. My argument was simply that higher gas prices lead to less driving and purchases of more efficient cars. This post is not about a gas or carbon tax, but about a price floor on gas.
This is what happens when academics think reality is an excuse to let go of moral principles and the core values of a society. To drive in a big fast car, alone, anywhere I want, with no traffic lights and free parking when I get there–these are constitutional rights and the basis of American identity. You could look it up. Why should I care whether the planet is habitable, if all my important freedoms are taken away and life isn’t worth living?
You are also violating a fundamental political norm by talking about taxes and services in the same essay. These have nothing to do with each other: taxes should be low, especially for me, and I have a basic right to good uncongested roads to drive on toll-free. Completely unrelated topics, please do not confuse them in the same post.
It’s not only in America where these core values prevail. For example see the price of gas in Venezuela.
A starting point for discourse on gasoline prices has to be the pathetic acknowledgment that, in this country, no gasoline price is ever low enough — a cultural constant that, year after year, paralyzes the national leadership of both major parties. Maybe it was that recognition that impelled the Editorial Board of the NY Times (Jan 16), in looking to higher state gas taxes, to identify Federal lawmakers as “so fearful of raising taxes ahead of an election that they refuse to do so.” Alas, linking that deadlock to pending elections is an inviting, but skewed, account of the issue. Take note: it’s been President Obama, who has steadily and explicitly declined to support an increase in the federal gas tax — unchanged at 18.4 cents/gallon since 1993 — and now dependent on fiscal legerdemain by the current Congress to bail out the strapped Highway Trust Fund. Never mind that there appeared, fleetingly, a hint of some bipartisan Congressional willingness to at least contemplate a rise in the gas tax. Presidential leadership might not have been sufficient to break the impasse. But it surely would have been necessary.
I am not opposed to the idea of such a price floor but I do not see how it could be implemented. Suppose a price floor of $2.00/gal. Wouldn’t the gasoline price at the pump end up being $2.01/gal so that all the rent is captured within the gasoline supply chain rather than by the government? It seems to me that a price floor would facilitate collusion and the government would get nothing out of it. A tax rate that is inversely proportional to gasoline price seems like a better idea, although it brings other complications.
Sebastien, good point about facilitating collusion. However, if the price floor is pegged to the price of international oil, e.g. Brent or WTI, then California companies won’t be able to manipulate the price in this manner.
You might be interested in my recent commentary on this subject: https://theconversation.com/what-should-america-do-with-its-2-per-gallon-gas-windfall-52258
Even if we only captured 20% of this windfall for public purposes, we could tackle a number of problems.
Nice post! Thanks for sharing. I spend too little time reading.
“A neoclassical economist suggests a price floor. My version of the idea goes like this. ” This would be OK with me IF there was a ‘price cap’ too. Either you want a free market or you don’t. Either you want simple tax policy or you don’t. you cannot have the ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ policies. Since ‘society’ owns the ‘social goods’ it can set the prices. Currently we are paying the external costs of carbon in the form of ‘wasted’ time traveling [due to congestion], healthcare expenses, etc. in a perfect world the charge for carbon would be ‘extracted’ at the point where the resource is extracted from the ground, then it would certainly get passed on to the user. The impact of carbon emissions are global, so the extraction tax should be at the source — effectively increasing the price of oil/b. The luck of the draw would mean that oil-rich countries would get a windfall .. so be it.
This was basically what Colombia did with its fuel price stabilization fund. It taxed heavily during the last fuel price drop, and subsidized somewhat as fuel prices rose. The problem is that nobody knows how long a high price will last. By subsidizing fuel when it’s expensive, you of course encourage people to keep using it…boosting consumption and extending the period of high prices. It is very hard to design a fund like that to last through an extended period of very high prices.
Thank you for the educative review that includes lots of important literature. The idea of price floor is a nice one and can be really economically justified keeping in mind high external costs of oil. However, following your line of thought, the use of the windfall of profits should at least partially be directed to development of efficient public transportation, green energy solutions etc, to provide better alternatives for polluting private transportation.
Very good point. Will add this.
There are certainly potential benefits from setting a floor price for gasoline, particularly in preventing backwards movements in fleet fuel economy and limiting GHG emissions. However, such a proposal does have one major drawback: it limits the ability of demand to respond to low oil prices – which would only increase oil price volatility and could cause oil price downturns to be more severe and more prolonged.
The current downturn is a key case in point. The current downturn started because increasing U.S. oil supply limited the influence of OPEC, which in turn vastly increased production to maintain revenues even as prices fell. This led to a massive supply-demand imbalance. Most supply generally takes years to respond to price declines but demand can be more responsive. In the U.S., where gas taxes are low, this has indeed been the case. But globally, gas taxes or subsidies abroad limit the demand response in European and other oil markets, meaning that oil prices had to go down a lot further than they would have otherwise. The lack of increased demand has thus only exacerbated the supply glut and led to lower oil prices than would have otherwise occurred (with a potentially longer duration).
This is not to say that a gasoline price floor or similar mechanism is without merit. But consideration of any such mechanism needs to recognize knock on effects that could limit that mechanisms’ effectiveness.
Are you seriously saying that during times of low prices, consumers have a social responsibility to burn as much fuel as possible…so as to drive prices back up? On what planet are high energy prices or extra carbon emissions a good thing?
Maximilian, perhaps it doesn’t show up on your browser, but that comment was a reply to Alex Gilbert. I like your idea very much, but I am mystified by Mr. Gilbert’s comment.
So sorry. I am not very good at WordPress.
Understood, I’ve made the same mistake!