Close your eyes and let's pretend...

Oil has found itself to be even more newsworthy than usual today, what with the teamsters on strike and Gordon Brown planning to take an expensive sojourn down to Jeddah in an attempt to try and pull a few strings with Saudi oil chiefs. Whether or not he'll achieve anything remains to be seen (our guess is that he won't), but regardless of the outcome, his decision to actually visit oil chiefs instead of calling by telephone or giving a Facebook poke shows the severity of the upcoming oil crisis - which hasn't really even started yet.

Though there's always a chance that Gordon wants to meet with the Saudis in person in order to simply give the UK public the impression that he's doing whatever he can in the face of adversity, the real reason that he's going is most likely to keep good relations sweet enough to ensure that a steady supply of oil comes into the UK when the reserves dry up even more so. In the future, it seems, the relationship between energy and political power is to play an even more important role in effecting international power distribution. Unless we find a new source of energy soon then, here in the West, we are nothing more than a slowly sinking ship.

The BBC has an article today that briefly summarises the international political implications of the proposed oil crisis. For a more in-depth discussion of the same topics we'd recommend a book called The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, which goes into the same issues with greater detail.

The biggest threat to the way that the world is structured comes in the form oil rich nations finding empowerment through the dearth of supplies in other nations and being able to charge them whatever they want to. Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and Iran can all be put into this category, and are all currently accused of using the pull that they have with oil to win over political influence - especially the Russians.

If the world's power structure does shift dramatically then the UK economy is going to take a bruising unlike any in previous memory. Our whole system is built upon the tenuous and misguided disbelief that oil is the solution to all our problems. And the most daunting thing is that nobody in government seems prepared to face up to the fact and simply fess up the hard facts to the public. The only thing that doesn't seem to be about to run out of fuel is the train on the tracks that we've tied ourselves to. And that's getting closer by the minute.

Not only is Brown wasting fuel in his trip to Jeddah, he's wasting time, good grace and fake smiles; all in order to uphold the misguided belief that everything will be OK if we just keep pretending that it is.

Written by Oli Anderson on 13 Jun 2008 1:20 PM. Permalink