New York Times solicits readers’ gas-tax views

By Steven T. Corneliussen

If it’s true that science outreach can sometimes work best when scientists join a civic discussion rather than trying to generate one, then some readers of these science-and-media reports might want to accept the New York Times’s latest “Invitation to a Dialogue.” What’s your view of the energy implications of a gas tax?

The invitation stems from a letter responding to the Times’s 16 August editorial “The Clear Case for the Gas Tax”. It argued that allowing the federal 18.4-cents-per-gallon levy to expire next month would harm the environment and “be tremendously destructive” by bankrupting “the already stressed Highway Trust Fund, with devastating effects on the country’s highways, bridges, mass transit systems and the economy as a whole.” The editorial called for President Obama not only to “press to extend the tax now” but to “start explaining why ... this tax will need to rise.”

The discussion-catalyzing letter offers plenty of connections to energy topics. It argues that the “current tax does not reflect the military spending incurred to protect our access to cheap energy, the damage to the environment or the long-term implications of future supply disruptions.” It declares that oil “is not an unlimited resource.” It calls for a phased rise to  $1 or more per gallon, with the revenues applied to transportation and “research into fossil fuel alternatives.”

Following the letter, the Times has inserted this note: “We invite readers to respond to this letter for our Sunday Dialogue. We plan responses and [letter author] Mr. Winzenried’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com.”

Long odds work against getting a Times letter published, but a huge audience sees the letters that do appear. My theories, for what they’re worth: Pithiness matters hugely, and the de facto deadline is probably first thing Friday morning, 19 August.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.