If you've survived all the fear mongering of climate change (we're all going to die by 2018!) then the latest rubbish about the price of petrol will finish you off.
A report put out by the CSIRO claims that petrol "could" reach $8 a litre by 2018, coincidentally the year we all die of heat stroke, bubonic plague, malaria, dehydration and famine.
Of course that's the worst case scenario. The good news is that Carbon Trading will only account for 25 cents of that. Yay!
I have only read the headlines and not the full report, so i can't criticise the report as such- but I can criticise the journalists who quote it and the people who made the "Worst case scenario."
How do they come up with such a figure? Well it's easy- you extrapolate current supply and demand trends and it's easy to come up with that.
But people at the end of the 1800s were predicting that the price of hay would put transportation out of the reach of all but the richest by the year 1935 and that London would become unlivable because of the sheer quantity of horse droppings on the streets.
Oh look! We invented technology! Why did the price of hay drop to affordable levels? We found another form of transport which had a fuel that was in plentiful supply and over time became so cheap that even people in relatively poor countries could afford to use it.
That technological change itself produced a quantum leap in living standards right around the globe. I'm no expert on horses, but I have noticed hay advertised at $3.50 a bale in the past. I don't know how many kilometres to the bale a horse gets, but if you think back to what your grandparents used to tell you $3.50 (or perhaps 2 pounds) was once an astronomical amount of money. Now it's the price of a decent cup of coffee-- or 2 litres of unleaded. And most of us will go through our entire lives without buying a bale of hay.
We are once again at one of those technological change points. The doomsayers once again fail to see how the real world operates.
Petrol is going up in price because the demand is greater than supply. High school economics tells you as price rises demand falls. In the worst case scenario if you have to spend all your money on getting to work and then the price of petrol goes up again, you have to cut back your petrol use.
High school economics also teaches us that as the price rises supply increases. Those Arab nations will pump out oil faster when they can get $150 a barrel than then they can only get $50. But not only that, at $150 a barrel it becomes worth while to open up oil fields that are not profitable at $50. Even better, it suddenly becomes economical to go looking for oil in new and exciting places, to use new technology to get oil from deep under the ocean.
But it gets better still because as petrol gets to over $2 a litre people start thinking about converting coal to oil- we already have the technology to do that thanks to the oil embargoes against South Africa in the 1970s. And of course running cars on LPG and compressed natural gas starts looking good. And that's not even counting real technology jumps such as electric cars, fuel cells, solar cars etc.
So petrol MAY reach $8 a litre, but I doubt it, unless there are major supply disruptions such as a Middle East war. But even if it does, will it matter? We will by then be well on the way to finding alternatives, so it won't matter any way.
So be happy and in the words of the Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy- Don't Panic!
I'm sure things will change to accomodate the rising price of fuel. I saw the CEO of one of the larger corporations in Tampa interviewed on the news. He said they were going to a 4 day work week, 10 hours a day still gave the employees a 40 hour week, but it saved 20% on their gas.I'm sure there are a lot of jobs that can be done from home too with all the technology we have. If fast food places in America can outsource their drive-through to India, I'll just bet that once people get used to the idea, a lot of people will be working at least part of the time from home - which will be good if the next panic is bird flu!! :lol:
ReplyDeleteYou're right Lois!
ReplyDeleteHow can anyone say what price carbon trading will contribute?The whole point of a carbon trading scheme is to alter people's (individual and corporate) behaviour, though carbon emission permits being a finite resource. No-one's behaviour will change until the price of carbon emission becomes more than noticeable. The price of petrol has doubled in a few years, but behaviour is still only changing slowly. Public transport utilisation is up in capitol cities (though arguably already overloaded), but that's about it. The range of foods in our supermarkets, shipped across the country, processed, then shipped across the country again, demonstrate we're more concerned with little conveniences than with the current cost of running all those trucks. To really bring about change through market forces will take a lot more pain. How bad do you think it'd have to be to bring about straighter and flatter roads for trucks, vastly improved rail services through the whole country, different habits of food consumption, or even convince people to only drive to the shops once per week? (apparently some people shop daily).If there's no pain, it won't achieve change.I don't actually believe emission reduction is required to "save the world", though I would like to see improvements in efficiency, and people being less wasteful. It's just silly when people claim we need severe instruments to force a change, but then pretend there'll be no real discomfort. If that were the case, we wouldn't need the scheme anyway.It's a similar argument to interest rates. People were calling on the federal government to provide relief in the face of rising interest rates, or even try to force them down, at the same time as the Aust reserve bank was raising rates in attempt to slow spending and borrowing.They should be calling on those who are overspending, or those who offer deceivingly easy credit.
ReplyDelete