Supply and demand
Supply and demand. We demand more gas, but supply doesn't go up; no refineries built in the US for decades (and, no, that's not because of environmental regs, oil companies themselves used $25/barrell as the assumed price to calculate profitability) and so gas is scarce.
While neither oil companies nor OPEC run as a charity to benefit our SUV drivers, on this issue, I doubt they are as much to blame for $3 gas as simple supply and demand. OPEC is producing at pretty much capacity, tanker fleets are being used pretty close to 100%, and then there is political instability not only in Mid East but in Latin America as well to add a speculative bonus to the prices.
And, as long as increasing efficiency is regarded as girly-man, we'll be in this mess. I've never quite got why so many think that efficiency improvements are so un-manly and unworthy of engineering effort.
And as for the taxes on gas. Go back to your first macro-economics class and remember that discussion about externalities. Pollution is an external cost – I can pollute the general atmosphere and I don’t have to breath my own pollution. Putting a tax on something to simulate the social cost of pollution actually increases the efficiency of the market because it makes producers bear the full costs of what they do.
So the proposal most discussed among the Gore/global warming/enviro crowd is an energy tax – a revenue-neutral tax. Add taxes on the consumption of energy and lower other taxes enough to offset the overall effect. So if we added $0.30/gallon to the gas tax but cut everyone’s income taxes by whatever would balance that out, then we’d have added a market incentive for private industry to produce more efficient cars and trucks. No 9,000 pages of regulations, no fussing over if an SUV is a truck, a light truck, or whatever. Phase it in over a few years to give everyone time to adjust. You want to drive a big SUV, you pay for its real cost to the environment, and then it’s your choice. Because it’s revenue-neutral, it’s not a drag on overall economic activity, it just shifts the incentives.
I know that idea is despised greatly by many and it’s called ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’, but I just don’t get the ferocity of the opposition. It’s making the market work and keeping government out of technological decisions like what type of engine to use or if you can have a car longer than x number of feet.