Ooh, it’s a real battle of the dumb out there. Who is the dumbest party in this week’s hot story?

The fuel protesters, for their spectacular impression of a highly mechanised King Canute? Oil prices are high because of reduced production post-Katrina, and the ongoing rise in demand from China and India; meanwhile the percentage of fuel costs as tax has been steadily falling and is comparable to that of France and Germany. Their angle on this complex problem? Bitch, whine and blockade the UK’s refineries.

The Great British Public, who have once again resorted to mob idiocy? With the threat of panic-buying emptying the UK’s petrol reserves, they’ve decided to confront this fear by panic-buying and empty the UK’s petrol reserves. Spineless, predictable fuckers, the lot of them.

Or, the British government? By mooting the use of draconian anti-terror laws and the army as an effective response, they’ve descended once again to a dundering war mentality. To them, being “tough” doesn’t mean pursuing a harder line on the difficult and resilient problems - reducing carbon emissions, promoting renewable technologies or profligate waste of energy, but sitting back, waiting for a problem to manifest itself first, before throwing policemen and soldiers at it.

So, there we have it. Knuckleheads on one side, a ham-fisted government on the other, and a public willing to dance to whatever tune they play. The only good that will come out of this is that maybe this time round, we’ll start questioning the status quo, even though we failed to do so when the same thing happened five years ago. Our transnationally-scaled, supply chain-oriented economy is too dependent on centralised production and mass haulage - we’re facing the threat of a few hundred disgruntled lorry drivers bringing the country to its knees. This is one weakness.

The other weakness is that we’re spoiled, energy-wise: we take our cars when we should walk and we fly when we should drive (or more ideally, take the train or coach). Our reliance on just a single energy source, oil, makes our fate far too contingent on events we have no control over (such as Katrina). Combine it with our few, fragile points of attack and it adds up to a frightening lack of security; and as any security expert will tell you, prevention is better than cure.

In the five years since the last fuel protests, the government has done bugger-all in this respect. Jailing stupid truckers or forcing the army through blockades will not make us any more resilient to future oil price shocks or other disasters; taking steps to move us to a more distributed, locally-oriented, sustainable and energy-efficient economy will. Maybe this time, instead of panicking and autmoatically heading to suck the nearest petrol pump dry, some people will start considering the merits of an alternative.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 23:16:34 and is filed under General.