Once the tax is levied and the revenues start rolling in, there's no way that the money grubbers in DC would spend it (or even most of it) on alternative energy research. It'd be like what has happened with the tobacco settlement money in most states* - the money goes into the general revenue fund and gets spent for everything else but what it was intended. It's naive to think DC would do any better. The revenues from the taxes you propose would be tens of billions each year. Once it starts coming in, any attempts to cut fuel consumption would be met with stiff resistance**.

* Last week, I was at a local hardware store loading something into my wife's minivan. Out front, two earnest young men were trying to get signatures on a petition to put an initiative on the ballot. They wanted to increase tobacco taxes to add to money for children's health care. I declined to sign. If government funding of children's heath care is such a priority, why should smokers be hit to pay a disproportionate share of the load? If tobacco taxes are used for so many things completely unrelated to smokers, why should smokers be treated so unfairly?

**I read recently that one state was investigating an alternative to the fixed gas tax per gallon scheme that based the taxes on miles driven instead of gallons consumed. The politicians were complaining that people who were driving high mileage cars like the hybrids were not paying their "fair share" in taxes. And so it begins. Revenues are to a politician as crack is to a junkie - there's no such thing as enough.