Problem is, you'd end up screwing over the poor - that is, all the people who cannot afford a Prius or similar hybrid/electric vehicle.
Are we also screwing over the poor by not outright giving them a vehicle to drive, a place to live, and free Internet? Disadvantaging the poor doesn't automatically imply unfair. Especially if you're living in New York City, already one of the most expensive places to live.
It would also jack up the price of nearly anything that is transported over the roads... again hitting the poor the hardest of all.
Higher gas prices means that people have less money to pay for other goods, so prices won't uniformly go up - goods not reliant on gas will fall in price. This reflects and redistributes allocation of goods based on the new "cost" of gas.
This means more tax money to spend, of course, so goods demanded by the government will also rise in price. (If it means, however, that they're borrowing less money and keeping the same spending habits, then the interest rate will fall.)
However if this were due to a natural disaster, the increased prices would reflect the new scarcity of gas and the fewer number of total goods bring produced overall. Having fewer goods to allocate among society (in this case) isn't "unfair", that's just the cold hard truth that no law will fix.