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COMMENTARY
May 31, 2008
Carpe diem
I have been accused of pessimism, by sundry correspondents, for my fairly consistently dark analyses of current trendlines in worldly affairs. And it is true that I take a characteristically impassive view of human developments, and verily, a sceptical view of human motivations. This is what keeps me cheerful. For when something bad happens I am usually prepared for it. And when something good happens I am genuinely surprised.But today I would like to break out dancing on the sunny uplands, and exult in the joy of a development so intrinsically happy that I have strayed into something resembling optimism over it. Not that it matters so much to me -- for I don’t drive a car, and if you don’t count my newspaper column, and maybe the cigarettes, I leave a carbon footprint smaller than a Third World child’s. (Well, maybe a middle class Third World child’s.) It is rather on behalf of my fellow man that I find myself singing. I refer, of course, to soaring oil prices. There are, I’ll admit, several downsides to this (check the food prices), but for today we will overlook them. Today, we will live for the moment, and on the theme, “Don’t worry, be happy.” To start with, the world is hardly running short of oil, or other carbon fuels (rich, beautiful coal for example), and the soaring oil prices should by now have brought this to everyone’s attention. Huge investments are now going into vast petroleum fields discovered offshore Brazil. There are further indications of undersea reserves on that scale from Arctic to Antarctic in all the seven seas. Iraq has been (thanks to the U.S. invasion) methodically prospected at last, and discovered to be lying over oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia. North America sits on numerous grand oilfields, that have hardly been touched (thanks to our friends, the eco cherubs), and Canada is especially smiled on by fortune, for as the oil price rises to levels where they’ll be well worth extracting, our eyes can only glint in reflecting the sparkling treasure of our tar sands. Those are all reasons in themselves to be happy, and confident about the material future, for they take away all unreasonable fear that the world will run short of carbon fuels, before technological advances obviate our need for them -- perhaps in the next century. It also means that the lock on oil supply which very nasty regimes, such as those which control Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have been enjoying, must soon crack loose. As in 1973 and 1979, the current high price was inspired by their efforts at extortion through the OPEC cartel (and decidedly not by the oil companies), but will end, as all things end, even in this world, with the spankers spanked. We can further be sure that such regimes, which pride themselves on tactical cunning, are not smart enough to see what’s truly coming in a decade or less, when all the alternative sources start pouring onto the market. Or if they get wiser, God bless them. Better yet, soaring oil prices are the best possible assurance of clean air and water, for the excess demand creates tremendous pressure to conserve the resource, and use it more efficiently. Indeed, the more profit the large oil companies make (Exxon-Mobil is my personal favourite), the more they can invest in the cleanest high-tech operations -- from the pipeheads through the refineries to the oil tankers and depots -- for they won’t want to waste a single drop. But the best news of all is the hammering the various Green and greenish political parties of the Western world are going to be receiving at the polls, very soon, as their reward for buying irretrievably into the “global warming” hysteria. The truck drivers are already blocking the roads in Europe, consumers are showing their hands as voters, and every left-centre party that plastered itself with the Green Label is racing to soak it off. For the foreseeable future, electoral tolerance for politicians who propose to mount more punitive taxes atop the soaring oil, will be hovering near zero. This is paradoxically good, or more precisely, less bad news for such as Canada’s Stéphane Dion, for the perfect place for an environmentally-sensitive politician to be right now, is out of power. Environmentalists ought to be celebrating high oil prices -- the market is doing their work for them -- and yet they look so morose. That cheers me, too. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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