Tough Love or Bad Parenting ?  

The SMH has an entertaining column on increasing fuel taxes vs decreasing them - We need tough love, not bad parenting (though I find the idea of Mr Rudd as the national parent dispensing tough love a little creepy).

The truth is that fuel is like food. Our capacity to suck calories from nature began as survival but custom and convenience have made us wildly, self-destructively profligate in this pursuit. Of course, food is fuel. It is no accident that food and fuel prices are now soaring, together and in parallel, across the globe. Peak oil and population pressure, long dreaded, are here. Fossil fuels, even in the production of food, worsen climate change, making food harder to extract, requiring more fuel and so on. Vicious circle.

But it's not Kevin Rudd's doing. Nor, sadly, is it in his power to fix. The entire fuel-price fandango over levies and leaks was so completely beside the point as to suggest some diversionary conspiracy. If only they were so clever, right?

Which is why Michael Pollan's latest book, In Defence Of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, is so seductive in its subversion. Pollan says we must "pay more, eat less". Fat is only part of the reason. There's also the longevity effect of calorie reduction, and the fact that preferring quality to quantity benefits both the environment (better soil, fewer chemicals, no GM) and the body.

In the US, in four decades, household food spending has halved, while food-related disease - from "the Western industrial diet" - has rocketed. Why? Cheap food is calorie-high but nutrition-low. You need more of it just to get fed. Same with fuel. For too long we've sucked too many fossil-fuel calories too easily and paid far, far too little for the privilege. Now, as change looms, do we accept peak oil as an answer, not a problem? Do we make "pay more, use less" our fuel motto? No, we continue, brat-like, to demand more for less, threatening tantrums should any leader deny us.

So climate change, as the former international oil executive Ian Dunlop notes, is "the ultimate tragedy of the commons". This idea dates back at least to Aristotle: "What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own."

And maybe that's just human nature. But human behaviour can change, and be changed by tax. So we must reject the bad parenting our leaders pathetically offer, demanding instead the tough love we need. Demand, for our own sake, the increased fuel prices that can make change smooth, not catastrophic. That's moral courage. That's citizenship.