THE soaring price of oil is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries.
The surging price of oil, from just over $US10 a barrel a decade ago to $US100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world.
These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. It is intensifying the politics of climate change and adding urgency to the search both for fresh sources of crude and for oil alternatives once deemed fringe.
The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Their increasing muscle has a flip side: a decline of US clout in many parts of the world.
Steep gasoline prices also threaten America’s long love affair with the automobile, while putting strains on many lower-income people outside big cities, who must spend an increasing share of their budgets just on fuel to get to work.
Read it all from the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.
See this story about the individual who made the one single trade above $100 yesterday, and then sold it for a loss. It appears that he wanted to get a footnote in history as the first (and hopefully only) person to buy oil for $100/bl.
note that the increase in oil prices mist significantly impact the poorer among us (as they are regressive), yet the liberal establishment, that purports to care about the poor more than heartless Republicans, is not concerned at all about rising prices. My justification for claiming they are not concerned at all: they fundamentally oppose any increase in production, drilling etc.
Steven,
The truth is out — it is NOT the oil companies that set the prices at all — it is the commodities traders! And they artificially set the prices at a whim, not according to true market value.
Let’s put oil on the free market system: the oil companies buy directly from the oil suppliers, and see what that does to the prices.
chris, i beg to differ with your view to demonize environmentalists. i am no liberal to be sure but i personally think we have been way underpaying for petrol for quite some time. it is going to be quite painful now because we have had cheap gas for so long. as with most addictions it is gut wrenching to get off the stuff. it will take some great political will and foresight to get us through our oil dependence. sometimes it is beneficial to see the greater good of clean air and water and not selling off our land to people who really care nothing of the poor but would rape the land and seek to make us even more dependent. this pain would spur new innovations and also push us toward decent public transport, of which we are woefully behind most developed nations. thanks for listening.
[i]as with most addictions it is gut wrenching to get off the stuff.[/i]
To put it plainly, that’s just nonsense.
It’s only an addiction when there are other choices. This is like calling food dependence an addiction. With oil there is NO OTHER CHOICE. We need oil in our cars, our trains, our factories, our airlines, our energy plants, etc. It is a fact of life that oil is the life-blood of our current society.
We just can’t say “Well, we will decide to do away with the need for oil and bike the 30 miles to work today.” Oil is a necessity, not a luxury.
The days of living in a flat above your store are long gone. As are the days when you and all your relatives for six generations lived in the same town all your lives.
Oil gave us a good deal of freedom, and that freedom was for the good of the economy of the nation: people could move or commute to where they had better opportunities for jobs, schools, etc.
What we need to do is a) build more refineries (many of the existing refineries are due to be partially shut down for routine scheduled maintenance) and b) drill for domestic supplies of crude oil in ANWR and the Gulf and other regions and c) begin developing viable alternatives (not the placebo of ethanol).
Oh, and by the way, we have more forested land now than we did 100 years ago, thanks to the forest industry re-planting cut areas and planting ‘tree farms’. True they are not old growth, but they are forest lands where animals have made habitats.
we have cleaner air and water and healthier soil than we did 100 years ago thanks to anti-pollution and superfund legislation for land reclamation.
Overall, the U.S. is leading the way in anti-pollution measures, in spite of what Kyoto and Algore would have us believe. If you want to rag on someone, hit China and Mexico. They are the worst offenders today.