No Worries

A wonderful Aussie phrase I've always been fond of. It can mean many things depending on usage, and one of my favorite applications is the double-edged plea for reassurance, as in when you find an old friend in the lineup at a gun shop and you ask him what he's doing there:

"Oh, well I'm sure that the rumours about giant hairy vicious mutant man-eating wombats are exactly that--rumours. Still, no worries, right?"

In North America, a phrase with similar currency has surfaced: "It's all good." I'm told--often--that I am inordinately fond of it.

Today, ludicrous rumours of $2.70-a-litre gasoline have been bubbling around. Naturally I treated them with the scorn they deserved. Yet on the way home, noticing that it's running at around $1.09 a litre (lowest it's been in days) and seeing also that the car had just under half-a-tank, and despite the fact that I had formerly had no plans to do so--had even planned to gracefully ignore rumour, I pulled in and filled up.

Still; it's all good, right?

I loathe lungs. Specifically mine, which in the wake of the recent bog fire have been forcing me to take hits of an inhaler twice a day and are responsible for the blog post you are reading now. If there's really a black market in healthy lungs from South American street youth, could the goddam bastards responsible please contact me? Let's not be @$$holes about it though--two kids, one lung each, okay?

But to get back to gasoline: Dalton McGuinty is trying to look as though he's "doing something" about gas prices at the pump--which in fact are one of the few truly market-driven indices at work. The reason oil prices go where they go is well-explained by this article. The reason gas prices go where they go is explored here.

The one thing that the articles don't cover though, is the lack of transparency in the upper reaches of the oil industry. The industry's companies actually don't reveal their raw material costs, so we never quite know what each individual company is laying out, nor by how much they may be profiting.

Notwithstanding. Price controls on anything are a bad idea except when there's clear evidence of collusion in price-gouging (which isn't illegal--just nasty), despite Mr. McGuinty's fond hopes. So if gas hits $2.70 a litre, it'll be becuase we as a society have decided that's what it's worth paying for it.

Perhaps this will be the spur that propels us in a direction beyond oil. Our local bus company, having blown its fuel budget for the year in the first few months, has finally started seriously testing electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-powered buses. The Post-Carbon Institute is probably seeing a lot of interest right now, no? Or maybe not.

Note that the no politician has yet said: "This is primarily the fault of SUV-driving soccer moms and guys with really small penises and Hummers."--oh no!

But the real crux of the matter is this: it's not the developed world that really suffers. Oh sure we bitch at the pump like crazy, but it's the parts of the world that are struggling upward that really get killed. Developing nations rely on older technology for economic production, so they need more oil per unit of economic production.

Ethiopia has been clinging to an economy that's been improving by inches. The current price rise in oil could shave enough off its economy to send it stagnant. China, which has been importing oil like mad to fuel feverish growth, is looking for more reserves--hence the recent China National bid for an American company, which was shamefully fear-mongered away. Indonesia, now a net importer of oil, could face economic stagnation this year. And in all the developing world, the economic margins on which people live are a lot thinner.

If gas really did hit $2.70 a litre, I'm lucky enough, close enough, and fit enough to bike to work. The SO enjoys the freedom of reasonable mass transit (though the price would certainly go up). For most of us in Canada, it'd come down to choices about whether to drive to the restaurant or walk. In Indosnesia, it might come down to whether your family eats today.