were raised in October and were scheduled to rise again in April 2008, there was talk of protests and roadblocks if the tax issue was not addressed. On 1 April 2008, a 25 yen per liter fuel tax in Japan was allowed to lapse temporarily. This method of softening price shocks is even less viable to countries with much lower gas taxes, such as the United States. Locally decreasing fuel tax can decrease fuel prices, but globally prices are set by supply and demand, and therefore fuel tax decreases may have no effect on fuel prices, and fuel tax increases might actually decrease fuel prices by reducing demand. But this depends on the price elasticity of demand for fuel which is -0.09 to -0.31, meaning that fuel is a relatively inelastic commodity, i.e. increasing or decreasing prices have overall only a small effect on demand and therefore price change. Demand management Transportation demand management has the potential to be an effective policy response to fuel shortages or price increases and has a greater probability of long term benefits than other mitigation options. There are major differences in energy consumption for private transport between cities; an average U.S. urban dweller uses 24 times more energy annually for private transport as a Chinese urban resident. These differences cannot be explained by wealth alone but are closely linked to the rates of walking, cycling, and public transport use and to enduring features of the city including urban density and urban design. For individuals, remote work provides alternatives to daily commuting and long-distance air travel for business. Technologies such as videoconferencing, e-mail, and corporate wikis, continue to improve. As the cost of moving human workers continues to rise, while the cost of moving information electronically continues to fall, presumably market forces should cause more people to substitute virtual travel for physical travel. Matthew Simmons explicitly calls for "liberating the workforce" by changing the corporate mindset from paying people to show up physically to work every day, to paying them instead for the work they do, from any location. This would allow many more information workers to work from home either part-time or full-time, or from satellite offices or Internet cafes near to where they live, freeing them from long daily commutes to central offices. However, even full adoption of remote work by all eligible workers might only decrease energy consumption by about 1% (with