the price of oil, green taxes and cutting steaks in half.
What factors are increasing the price of oil, recently over $135 a barrel? Is it the speculative ‘unregulated’ oil trading that William Pfaff, writing in the IHT, criticises? Certainly the black magic of contract trading is a factor, a parasite on the ‘real’ market for the commodity. According to the BBC, OPEC has so far blamed price rises on speculators and says there is no shortage of oil. Likewise, Pfaff considers the present situation with rising prices dissimilar to the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC announced that they would no longer supply oil to nations that supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. Paul Krugman, also in the IHT, is somewhat naive if he thinks that we are entering merely an era of scarce, expensive oil. This is more than an era. The buried sunlight that we like to burn is running out. Scarcity is the true reality. It’s more than Half Gone. Not only is the raw material that we are critically addicted to becoming more expensive as it becomes increasingly scarce, feeding our addiction in consuming oil is one of the major causes of global warming. ...