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Higher Fuel Prices
How Economics 101 could have prevented climate change
Why is it that, around the world, nothing sets citizens off into revolution more than high fuel prices? It almost seems that the evolving democracies had enshrined low fuel prices as part of their constitutions long before fuel ever existed.
Last month, we saw British truckers blockading refineries to get oil companies to lower their prices or to get their government to lower the fuel tax. Their contention was that they could not afford to operate anymore with higher fuel prices. Therefore they had a moral right to cripple the British economy — almost as if truckers and the services they provide would cease to exist if fuel prices were not lowered. This is absurd: we do need truckers to run our economies , and if higher trucking rates are needed to pay our truckers to stay in business, we will pay higher rates. If the British truckers organized themselves to stage protests, they certainly could organize themselves to demand a higher rate for their services.
In North America, the refining industry has been running at nearly full capacity for a few years. If three refineries had to shut down this summer, we would have seen a fuel shortage, whether the price of oil was $10 or $30 a barrel. Because we will gladly drive across town to buy gas at a half cent a litre less than…
