A Primer On Diesel For Stephane Dion

The word “diesel” just sounds bad, doesn’t it? It sounds dirty; it conjures up images of black exhaust-belching big rigs. It sounds old and obsolete, kind of like lard oil. So much so that a Conservative promise to cut diesel taxes had Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, in Napanee, Ont. yesterday, calling the idea something “still in [the] 19th century,” even though the diesel engine wasn’t really popularized until well into the twentieth.

It kind of makes you wish the folks producing the stuff would spend at least as much time cleaning up diesel’s public relations problem as they have cleaning up the fuel’s emission profile. How’s this for some suggested selling points: some diesel cars can get better fuel-efficiency than hybrids, a big reason why half the cars in Europe run on diesel. They emit far less carbon dioxide than standard gasoline, and clean technology has brought smog-producing pollutants down 98%. A study by the Martec group found that the 5 million diesel pickups sold in the U.S. since 1994 have cut American fuel consumption by 48 billion gallons, the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million non-diesel cars off the road. Popular Mechanics refers to the coming clean-diesel age as the “coming 75 mpg revolution.” Sign me up.

Actually, maybe wait till October 14th. Because, if the Conservatives win, they say they’ll cut diesel taxes in half. If the Liberals form the next government, this fuel-efficient, lower-carbon-emitting energy source could be in for some punishment: Mr. Dion has promised to raise taxes on diesel by 7¢ a litre, apparently in a bid to reduce consumption of the stuff. That’s debatable: the price of diesel is already roughly 50¢ higher per litre than just two years ago. After a spike like that, it’s hard to predict if a few more pennies will change anyone’s driving habits.

What it will almost certainly do is make life more expensive for truckers, and by extension, the folks who buy things delivered by truck, which is, well, everybody. Mr. Dion told truckers yesterday they should “drive in a way that use less diesel and so on.” Easy for him to say; wind power doesn’t get a big rig loaded with groceries very far down the TransCanada.

It’s unclear whether the Liberals have thought about diesel all that seriously, despite the fact that its taxation is a key part of the Green Shift proposal (standard petrol gets a pass). There, for instance, Mr. Dion predicts his diesel tax will cost the average trucker an extra $1,700 a year. That itself is no small change; the few truckers I know are independent operators with families who’d probably miss that thousand or two (Mr. Dion says he’ll make it up with a 15% tax credit for anyone who purchases an “auxiliary engine”).

If you divide Mr. Dion’s $1,700 estimate by 7¢, it would seem that he assumes the average trucker uses about 24,000 litres annually. Only, the Canadian Trucking Alliance says the average trucker uses more than three times that much -- between 80,000 and 90,000 litres yearly. Suddenly, the 7¢ tax means more like a $6,000 yearly hit to the bottom line of Canadian truckers. That doesn’t account, of course, for extra costs they’ll pass on to consumers — unless we hurry up and figure out a way to “use less diesel and so on.”


National Post
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