Fuel prices, shortages, strikes and protests

In Europe rising oil prices have caused protests by hauliers, fishermen, taxi drivers and others. In Spain 90,000 lorry drivers are on strike and there has been violence. In France lorry drivers will drive slowly along motorways in protest to rising fuel prices, copying what happened in England recently when lorry drivers first and then bikes slowed down sections of the motorway as a protest against high fuel prices. These are foolish gestures.

Now in England 600 oil tanker drivers are striking; the strike will only last for four days and affect only 10% of the garages but there are fewer petrol filling stations around these days, so those that remain will have longer queues. Some have already run out of fuel and the army is standing by to make sure that the police, ambulance service and the fire fighters get enough fuel.

John Hutton, Business Secretary, advises people not to waste a drop of fuel. I am not sure what that means. Does he think that before the strike started people went about wasting fuel? He also advises not to buy more fuel than you need. It might be excellent advice, but again what does it actually mean?

The same drivers announced that they will strike again soon, if their demands are not met. The present strike started on Friday morning, finishes on Tuesday, and by Saturday the strike will start again.

It is no accident, I suspect, that the tanker drivers chose to strike for four days. Garages have reduced their numbers over the past ten years, and those that remain usually hold around four or five days’ stocks.

It is part of the “just in time” method of doing business so that the business does not end up investing too much money in stocks of fuels, but rather relies on tanker drivers to arrive every few days to fill up the petrol stations underground tanks, The strike is organised to create maximum disruption at minimum loss of wages to the strikers.

People need cars. I know that many people take public transport, walk, get on their bikes and so forth but it is a simple fact of life that for the vast majority of people they cannot live comfortably without their cars. That is how we live, how we are now forced to live, by planning policies all built around the assumption that the motor car is an essential part of life.

You need to buy food for yourself and your family. Usually this means getting in the car and going to the large supermarket. In most cases these have been located miles away from where people live. You might be able to get there on a bus but you still have to get your shopping from the bus toy our home.

You can walk to the local shops every day although for many people the local shops are too far to walk to. You will have to go almost every day because you will find it hard to carry by yourself more than a day or two’s supplies of food and shopping.

You might be able to walk your children to school, instead of driving them. For many families, however, this is not an option.

If the nation had a safe cheap and reliable system of buses, undergrounds, trams and trains we would not find a strike by 10% of the nations oil tanker drivers any more than a n inconvenience.

Because we have few buses, which operate as a business and not as a service, because it costs twice as much for a family of four to travel by train from London to Manchester than it would cost them to drive, because it is easier to drive across the country from Norwich to Cardiff, rather than to change trains and suffer the endless delays of engineering works on the line, as well as the expense, we now have allowed the resources of public transport to decay.

Using decaying resources is not attractive and should be avoided if possible.

Thus we cling to our cars, and we create a way of life that is so dependent on them (for most people) that if the fuel to power the cars vanishes we panic.

People will panic. Platitudes and homilies by the Government cannot be put in the fuel tank to power the car. If we lose fuel we lose an important part of our lives.

We can see all this from the strike action of one tenth of the oil tanker drivers who strike for a few days at a time. The silver lining is that emissions will be down, but that will be cold comfort to those who want to get about the process of living. People like to close their eyes to just how much they rely on things that pollute and are in short supply. perhaps it is the only way they can cope. If the carbon emissions that the cars create touched people in the same “in your face” way as lack of vehicle fuel, the world would be one super protest.

Instead we only react to immediate problems. The long term problem of climate change will be sorted out, one way or the other but until the long term comes round people concdentrate on figuring out how to fill their cars with petrol in a strike, they panic, protest, and even resort to violence. If this is how we react when we are threatened with short term disruption and the problem of rising prices then what will we do when the oil runs out?