One of the things that is wrong with the Greens

From Frogblog:

the Transport Ministry has confirmed it is investigating a Green Party proposal to link car registration charges with fuel efficiency as occurs in Europe. Such an initiative is used in France, where car taxes are graduated according to engine size, while in Britain charges are based on vehicles’ CO2 emissions per mile.

Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, who is in charge of the Government’s energy efficiency programme, said such a scheme would reward people who bought “environmentally sensible” cars.

“It is essential to improve the efficiency of New Zealand’s vehicle fleet as quickly as possible to protect ourselves against ever-rising fuel prices and to reduce unnecessary climate change emissions,” she said.

“The only way to do that is to target vehicles entering the country.”

Now I don't know much about cars (understatement of the year), but my understanding that old cars are particularly fuel inefficient. You know who earns old cars? People who can't afford new cars. It's all very well to pretend that the only people who use lots of petrol are people who are using a gas-guzzling SUVs (it helps if you follow this up with some kind of gendered insult about the sort of person they are), but that's not reality. Too many of the Greens policies rely on regressive taxes to get behaviour changes, because they seem to blame ordinary people for the state of the world.

I'm not convinced by capitalism, governments, or much of what we have going on, but I do sometimes have opinions about how they should operate. Here's a basic philosophy: No policy goal is worth taxing the poor to achieve.