I graduated with a petroleum engineering degree in 1982. I spent 12 years in this industry. But even early in my career, I could see that we needed to watch what we were doing with all this fossil fuel buring. I believed we needed a much larger fuel tax--to discourage usage with a secondary benefit of raising government revenues.

Today we have people taking car trips for silly reasons, people taking plane trips for silly reasons, and ships moving silly goods across oceans. Had we had a much bigger fuel tax (like 50%), our economy would be doing things much more sustainably.

The goal should have been to "not create an emergency" in the first place. Western democracies cannot make these kinds of moves. So it will continue to put out fires that were started a decade or two ago.

At some point, we need a new way.