Opinion — Raising fuel prices as the best way to solve environmental problems

Making petrol and diesel more expensive is often presented as the single most effective answer to environmental damage. I largely disagree: higher fuel prices can reduce one kind of harm, but they leave most environmental problems untouched and work poorly unless other measures come first.

The policy does have a clear logic. When fuel costs more, drivers cut out unnecessary journeys, some switch to buses or electric vehicles, and manufacturers have a commercial reason to build more efficient engines. In this way a price rise can curb carbon emissions without the state having to police anyone's behaviour. The difficulty is its narrow reach. Deforestation, plastic in the oceans, overfishing and polluted rivers have little to do with what motorists pay at the pump. A measure aimed at fuel can therefore be no more than a partial solution to 'the world's environmental problems'.

Even within its own field, raising prices is not the best instrument. It changes behaviour only where an alternative exists; a rural worker with no bus route will keep driving and simply become poorer. Because fuel costs also feed into the price of food and other transported goods, the burden falls hardest on low-income households, which is why the fuel tax increase announced in France in 2018 provoked weeks of protest and was abandoned before it took effect. A measure that the public rejects cannot be sustained for long. By contrast, investing in renewable energy and reliable public transport gives people a cleaner option to move to, and enforcing stricter regulations on factories, logging and waste addresses the problems that fuel prices never touch.

Dearer fuel, in short, is a useful tool for discouraging pollution from vehicles, but it is neither broad enough nor fair enough to be called the best solution. It works only as part of a wider strategy in which cleaner alternatives are provided before dirty ones are penalised.