This post is a guest post by Morgan Downey. Morgan is a commodities trader and author of the recent book "Oil 101".

Recently, there has been a growing call for the U.S. to increase gasoline and diesel taxes to the levels that exist in Europe in order to encourage efficiency and reduce oil imports. However, there are fundamental differences between Europe and the U.S. that make this model unsuitable for here.

In this post, I look at the reasons the European model appears unsuitable here and propose an alternate method of encouraging fuel efficiency, even when gas prices are low.