Oil II
 Saturday. 24.May.2008 | Comments? | Permalink 820

As I write this I'm listening to the maddening honking of people protesting against the rise in the price of petrol. My office is adjacent to the main square of Porto, and these people have nothing better to do than spending a Saturday afternoon driving up and down the square blasting their gas-guzzler's horns. They seem to have had enough of the oil companies' abuse.

They're stupid. They are like junkies protesting against their dealers.

These are hard times if you drive a taxi, if you have a fleet of trucks, if you buy a bus pass every month, if you buy food that happens to have fertilizer involved in its production, etecetera. Hard times for all, and harder still they'll be. But you feel robbed because you drive alone to work every day in a car that has a bigger-than-1000cc engine because it's a bit chilly outside? You are just the bastard who's ruining it all for the rest of us. So shut you mouth.

It's true I drive a gasoline-powered car sometimes. But when I can't, I won't. I already take the subway or the bus during the day and if there were half-decent mass-transit solutions past 10pm I'd be more than happy to take my car in a last drive to the junkyard.

The personal automobile was one of the 20th century greatest mistakes, like asbestos or DDT, and is responsible for an addictive vicious circle of incompetence in both local politics and geopolitics. It turned urban planning to shit while sparking wars. So for once I'm on the Big Oil & Speculators' side. I do hope the Money Wizzes do manipulate the price of gas to rise as fast as possible, buffering it as much as possible from the real unavoidable, supply-and-demand price of crude, so that perhaps the inevitable changes in our way of life can start before the logic of failing supplies brings those changes in a way brutal and uncontrolable. ···