Motorists pay fossil fuel tax. Wind turbines live off it.

Perhaps in your country, but not in the US. Yes, there is a road fuel tax, but that goes for paying for a tiny fraction the road network that they require.

That just means that in the seesaw battle between American governments and the motorist, the motorist is momentarily ahead. City Hall must work more diligently to make so it's ten miles to anywhere, and if you have two errands, the second is ten miles farther on. It must fail to enforce speed limits, and its employees -- employees of all levels of government -- must be seen disregarding them. Mass media reporting of road fatalities must be in a very different style, a much less sensational one, from its reporting of other violent deaths.

(I'm not sure how government can make media outlets behave in this way. Does anyone know? CBC radio, publically owned, reports traffic tie-ups with the frequent unemphatic use of the phrase, "very serious accident". Maybe private media aren't so squeamish/venal. Not so squeanal. How about that, a new word.)

Let's try a thought experiment. An inexpensive retrofit comes along that enables cars and trucks to run on no gasoline and no diesel. Are they from then on forbidden to use public roads, or do we decide that public roads are a public good that should be paid for in the same way as, for instance, libraries and cruise missiles?

It seems to me roads are a public good whose benefits flow to more of society than just those who burn fossil fuel derivatives on them, and these benefits exceed their cost. If, as above said, this in turn exceeds their yield of public fossil fuel revenue, the pretence that that revenue is taken to pay for roads is not just a driver of insane government behaviour, it is simply false. Governments tax fossil-derived motor fuels because they can. If they could not, roads would still get funded. Not only would they get funded, they would work better, because the regulatory emphasis on deniably maximizing fossil fuel sales to their users would be absent.

--- G.R.L. Cowan ('How fire can be tamed')
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan