DR. STRANGELUBE, OR HOW WE LEARN TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE EXPENSIVE PETROLEUM:

Why we should love high oil prices (Martin Vander Weyer, 25/04/2006, Daily Telegraph)

The official figure for inflation, reported last week, is a barely significant 1.8 per cent - because, while fuel has risen, the cost of manufactured goods, including clothing and electrical goods imported from low-wage Asian countries, has fallen dramatically. [...]

[T]here are sound, non-doomster arguments why the price is just as likely to fall back in the medium term, and it is worth rehearsing the reasons why a period of relatively high oil prices has not been entirely a bad thing.

For a start, it changes the power structure and investment profile of the global oil industry. At current price levels, oil companies can exploit deep offshore deposits in the North Sea, the Caspian and the Gulf of Mexico, and reopen smaller, depleted wells in Texas and elsewhere.

The frozen wastes of Siberia and Central Asia look a lot less inhospitable than they used to.

Suddenly Canada, one of our closest allies, is a big player in the 21st-century energy game, with its vast wilderness tracts of tar-soaked sands in northern Alberta.

All these new and mostly non-Opec sources can now feasibly be brought on stream, along with new refining capacity in which the industry was reluctant to invest when prices were low.

All these factors combine to mean that we are slightly less at the mercy of the Opec cartel and the violent instability of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, at the consumer end of the equation, higher oil prices engender better environmental and economic behaviour. [...]

Eventually, however - experts disagree widely as to when, but it won't be soon - the world will run out of oil. By the time it happens, man will have harnessed new energy from the sun, the tides, the wind, the hydrogen cell and advanced forms of nuclear fission.

The present phase of high prices will help both to retard the exhaustion of oil and to accelerate the search for alternatives. It may be uncomfortable and worrying in the short term, but in the long term we may even be thankful for it.

MORE:
High gas prices propel a new 'moped madness': Scooters and mopeds see a rise in sales - and cachet - thanks in part to a youth energy ethic. (Patrik Jonsson, 4/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The moped and its bigger, flashier cousin, the scooter, are swarming out of Jimmy Carter's America and into George W. Bush's republic - a movement propelled by soaring gasoline prices surpassing those of the late 1970s and by legions of Americans who take seriously the call for oil independence. If the serious intent is mixed with a little fun from "moped gangs" who call themselves the Heck's Angels or the Hardly Davidsons, so much the merrier.

Though Gen-Xers and baby boomers are among those flinging a leg over these two-wheelers, the vehicles may owe their newfound cachet to their embrace by a younger set. Sometimes called "the millennials," they are said to embody a sense of social purpose, adopt a "team" approach to life, and rebel from their elders by hewing to the small-scale. It's an attitude with a simple message: Small-bore is cool.