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My
early
2011
reading picked up the oil and sustainable
economy themes
from 2010. Jeff Rubin's book Why
your
World is About to Get a While Lot
Smaller (Vintage, 2009)
makes predictions of slowly
dwindling supplies of easily
extractable oil, growing demand in India
and China and climbing oil
costs over the long haul. The
age of cheap oil is ending.
With it globliisation based on cheap
transportation must end and
the world will change. dramatically.
Enormous government cuts
loom. Local manufacturing returns, at a
price. Public transit becomes
more important. Rubin shows how with black
market gas at $8 a litre,
people in economically blocaded
Belgrade just left their cars at
home. Rubin claims that it was growing oil
prices, not sub-prime
mortgages, which were the root cause
of the latest and most
serious recession in the West. He predicts
more cyclic recessions
when oil prices rise enough again. Add to
this the serious costs of
using oil - the on-going climatic warming
now linked to human
activities such as burning fossil fuels.
There are policy choices to be
made. A carbon tariff could be equitably
applied over domestic and
overseas goods. It would have the effect
of favouring manufacturers and
suppliers whose goods produce less
atmospheric carbon emission. This
would create economic incentives in favour
of domestic suppliers which
tend to have lower oil or coal usage in
the manufacturing and
transportation.
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