Check out this commentary in the middle of a review last month of some very large new Mercedes SUV.

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Why, in the midst of a slow-rolling energy crisis, an unpopular war in a region of the world made strategic only by its oil, and the globe's climbing mercury, should precisely the wrong kinds of vehicles remain so popular?

One reason is surely the tax breaks associated with 3-ton SUVs: business owners get a $25,000 tax break on the purchase of full-size SUVs (scaled back from $100,000 in 2004) and five-year depreciation schedule. For people taking advantage of this cozy corner of Section 179, the GL -- with a base price anticipated to be about $60,000 -- will be virtually free. That makes your $4,000 hybrid tax break look pretty punk, doesn't it?

The tax code is the most obvious point of inflection between vehicle choice and public policy. Another knee-point is CAFE -- that's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, in case you forgot, and who could blame you?

Last year, the Bush administration proposed raising the light-truck standard -- long frozen at about 20 mpg -- to 24 mpg by 2011, an incrementalism that is marvelously measured, to say the least. Meanwhile, the administration plans to scrap the current CAFE structure in favor of a size-based regime co-written by the automakers, with larger vehicles required to achieve lower mileage.

Incidentally, some SUVs are so large that they transcend fuel-economy standards altogether. Vehicles with a gross-vehicle-weight rating over 10,000 pounds -- such as the Hummer H2 and the heavy-duty version of the Suburban -- are not counted among fleet ratings that automakers need to hit.

We have been told recently that we are addicted to oil, but we seem to be unable to do much about it. California's clean-air bureaus are trying to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and are being sued by manufacturers and the federal government for their trouble.

Raising fuel taxes cannot be accomplished, no matter the mood of national urgency and no matter the obscenity of oil companies' profits. Fuel taxes are doubly problematic: For one thing, they are regressive, hurting lower-income consumers; for another, buyers of luxury vehicles are less likely to be dissuaded from their giant purchase.

What about all the alternative vehicle technologies we've been promised? Thanks to a decade-long stonewalling by Big Oil and the trucking industry, it has taken until this year to phase in clean-diesel requirements that will give automakers the slightest hope of meeting 50-state emissions requirements (diesel-powered vehicles can be 25% to 40% more fuel-efficient than gas-powered vehicles). Other technologies -- bio-diesel, hybrids, ethanol, plug-ins, fuel-cells -- can in the near term only nibble at the edges of our 20 million barrels per day of oil consumption.

If we were serious about oil dependence, we would dramatically raise fuel economy standards, impose gas-guzzler taxes on noncommercial light trucks and lower the national speed limit.

None of that is going to happen.

So, in the face of this enormous governmental and regulatory inaction, this paralysis and denial, a curious new market equilibrium has arisen. Call it the marketplace of shame.

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Maybe Dan Neil reads TOD!