Carnival Corp., which in 2007 was among the first cruise companies to implement a fuel surcharge when prices spiked, has announced it'll be one of the first to get out. For 2010 bookings on the company's six major lines (Carnival, Costa, Cunard, Holland America, Princess, and the Yachts of Seabourn), the much-dissed fuel surcharge will be gone.

At the same time, Carnival said it would also be raising fares a little. The increase amount hasn't been announced yet, so it's hard to say from this vantage point whether it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. But raising prices at this time of year is nothing unusual in travel biz, which sets its rates for the future well in advance.

For their part, the airlines of America are not budging. Last month, reps at several of them said that although fuel prices were indeed lower, they were still running higher than their accountants had expected when they set the current budgets, so the fuel surcharges would stay.

That doesn't entirely square with the rest of the air industry, though. Several international carriers, including Qantas, KLM, Air France, and Malaysian, have cut them. Northwest recently reduced its fuel surcharges for cargo, but not for people. All this while the major players in America and the United Kingdom are keeping them as-is. Some analysts are staying it'll stay this way at least until (and if) oil drops below $80 a barrel and stays there for a while.

I wrote blog post the other day for BloggingStocks which poked fun at Donald Trump for his attitude towards the big oil companies. Needless to say, that blog post garnered quite a bit of interest. One of our readers left a comment on that post which put forward a concept for selling gasoline which might merit some extra attention. That reader, identified as "gumbo koontz", suggests that gasoline be priced for individuals according to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle they drive. This idea may sound rather punitive or arbitrary, but I think it has a lot of valuable merit.

What better way could there be to make people really think about their fuel usage than to make their effect on the situation more personally tangible for them? As the driver of a full-sized pick-up truck, I'm not against the idea of paying five or six cents a gallon more for my gasoline that someone who chooses to drive a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle. I do use my truck bed almost daily for various chores and payloads which a smaller vehicle couldn't touch, but the fact is that I use more gasoline to get from point A to point B. I can definitely see the merit in rewarding those drivers who trade off convenience for frugality.

How might a program like this work, and how could we administrate it accurately and fairly? Would it be viewed as punishment for those who use more gasoline or as reward for those who use less? Could it be administered at the pump or would it have to be handled with the government through the submission of forms and records? These are just a few of the questions which would need to be answered before a program like this could be made real.