Yes, but if you don't tax it correctly you will misallocate resources.

Diesel will get used excessively and you will get more road wear, as the user proposed. If you tax it, you will pay more directly for goods, but as costs rise people will be incentivized to find more efficient transport solutions.

It might still be worth it if road wear is cheap or the predictable misuse is predictable and that saves money somehow, but in all likelihood little harm would come from a fair treatment of diesel vs. gasoline etc. taking into account road wear of each vehicle class. It would be more natural to tax vehicle weight, hours driven etc. directly based on a sound model of societal cost though.

You are not wrong in theory, but this reads like an econ 100 short answer. It ignores all the political and social aspects of a very complex system.

Yes, I agree, and of course I sort of try to qualify it a bit. I think cheap, easy transportation has its own value. Creating a sort of fluidity, competition and so on, and it's not like one can't imagine a situation where somebody is the guy who controls all the rail deliveries to a town, or where he has bought all the rail transport demand in the past, so now he gets to be first. Roads, meanwhile, are open to everybody.

At the same time, I really do think that it could be beneficial to shrink trucks down, automate them, or create something which has so many bogies that the road wear is not greater than on a car, so I sort of argued for what I saw as theoretically fair without actually being sure that the outcome would be what I hoped for.

> only way we are able to eat affordable food is because some diesel truck is transporting it.

False, if poor people can't afford food, there are already food stamps and various programs in other countries.

This 'affordable' food is causing obesity, a combination of diesel subsidies, agricultural subsidies. Cheap food causes metabolic syndrome, and a range of chronic diseases, which we pay as healthcare, 20% of GDP and the fastest growing sector.

If its cheap food we want, stop ethanol subsidies. All that land (hundreds of millions of acres) can grow very very affordable food.

This foolishness is being repeated everywhere. India started E20 (Ethanol) mandate and price of eggs went up.

False, unhealthy and healthy food both take diesel to farm and transport at scale.

It's bad policy to influence prices by subsidizing one particular input that has much broader uses. Subsidizing diesel means you're indirectly subsidizing rice and flour, but also luxury cars and fancy watches.

> only way we are able to eat affordable food is because some diesel truck is transporting it.

I would also add to that affordable food is being first produced by agricultural machinery running on diesel, which is then transported by trucks running on diesel on roads build by machinery running on diesel. There is a good youtube video about this from channel driving 4 answers.

Why should food being transported further be subsidized more than locally sourced food?

Local food often has higher transportation costs than food from further away. Long distance food transportation is done by highly efficient ship & rail. The last mile transportation costs typically dominate. And semi-trailer from warehouse to grocery store is far more efficient than half-ton truck from farmer to farmer's market.

And then both are dominated by the drive from the grocery store to your house. If you care about food carbon emissions, walk/bike to your grocery store. That'll have far more impact than food choice.

Type of food still has sizeable impact even if the food miles issue has been misleading. Cutting red meat and dairy likely beats cycling for errands for example.

The switch from an ICE car to an EV (and assuming a standard US amount of driving) probably beats possible diet changes.

You can of course do all of these things.