I know I'm being extremely idealistic, but ...
We are where we are due to the auto industry and the oil industry, both buying off the Congress for their betterment while the country pays the price.
I really don't believe higher taxes would accomplish a thing - look at the recent run-up of oil prices. Fuel was still purchased regardless. Higher taxes would simply give a corrupt House and Senate more buck$ for their respective slush funds and not do a thing for the problems at hand.
Ordinarily, I'm not in favor of giving politicians hundreds of billions of dollars - waste, fraud and abuse tends to go hand in hand with that. But the US government already takes in about $2 trillion a year in taxes and other revenues and mis-spends much of it. What's another several hundred billion a year? Certainly they wouldn't spend it all on useful transit and other programs, but even if half of it found its way to infrastructure improvements, that would be worth it, IMO.
Higher fuel prices did cause consumption to decline. People didn't stop buying gas and diesel, but they bought less of it. In part, collapsing demand has fueled the price declines since July.
Sin taxes and other excise taxes are never intended to completely kill demand - the goal is usually to lessen demand and to extract lots of extra money from those who continue to partake.
WeAAsles is still smoking, but probably fewer packs a day than if smokes were a buck a pack. Higher prices tend to dampen demand.
And it's not just Hummers. It's all the soccer moms who drive one or two kids around in their Expeditions and Navigators and Escalades. It's solo commuters who think they need a Ford Explorer to get back and forth to work. And it's about people living far too many miles from where they work when there's no viable mass transit options. And with gas prices averaging about a buck a gallon from 1986-2002, why be the only chump on the block driving a fuel efficient econobox when everyone else had a gas guzzling performance car or monster pickup truck or luxury SUV?
And had gas been getting more expensive each year for the last 30 years, my guess is that people would have made far different decisions, many of which might have led to a smaller price run-up when the undeveloped world began demanding lots of oil in the past few years. Then again, maybe not.