Michael Greenstone has a nice quote on Marketplace making the green case for raising gas taxes now. At the same time, the NY Times recently reported that Ragu Rajan is celebrating that importer India is now paying low gas prices. "With crude prices now halved, fuel costs for trucks and cars have plunged, pulling down transport expenses and inflation. The cost of government fuel subsidies has nose-dived, helping curb the country’s chronic budget deficits. “We’ve got essentially a $50 billion gift for the economy,” said Raghuram G. Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India."
It would interest me to see the cross-national relationship between economic growth and the growth of GHG emissions for nations with different gasoline prices. Ideally such gasoline prices would be randomly assigned but I recognize that this would be a hard field experiment to implement.