Turns Case

Low Oil Prices Turn the Case only sustained high prices lead
to long term investment in renewable energy
Akst 6 Daniel Akst, contributing editor at the NYT and various other
publications, 9/17/06, The Good Thing about Oil Prices Is the Bad News, NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/business/yourmoney/17cont.html?
ref=yourmoney)
Dont kid yourself. Anything that reinforces the role of fossil fuels particularly oil
as the industrial worlds primary energy source is bad, not good. Anything that
prolongs the life of the internal combustion engine is a negative, not a positive.
Anything that makes it cheaper to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is
cause for mourning rather than celebration. What we need is not lower oil
prices but higher ones significantly higher, enough to deter consumption
and make us look seriously at alternatives. Of course, it would be nice not to
have to rely on cartels and circumstances to make us moderate our consumption.
Hefty taxes on carbon-based energy, the proceeds of which could fuel
research into nonfossil alternatives, would be a much better approach, since
then at least wed be paying ourselves instead of our friends at the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. As a bonus for saving the
planet, we might even undermine the intolerance and autocracy that are abetted in
many places by oil money. The sad fact is that just as oil is the lifeblood of Western
economies, oil revenue often is the lifeblood of tyranny. Oil-rich regimes that
trample the rights of women, finance terrorism and preach intolerance are sustained
by what we spend on gasoline and heating oil. The unfortunate paradox is that
moderating oil prices, while they may reduce the earnings of despots in the short
run, will only support our harmful addiction and the power of those same despots
in the long run. If that were the only bad thing resulting from lower oil prices, it
would be sufficient. Ah, but theres so much more. Lower oil prices would
promote more driving, for instance, a dismal outcome that would increase air
pollution and, in all likelihood, highway fatalities. More than 43,000 people were
killed on United States roads last year, and 2.7 million were injured. Many
thousands die annually from airborne pollutants as well. Then theres sprawl.
Cheaper gas will mean more far-flung, automobile-dependent communities. That
will bring more driving still, which will result in even more pollution and accidents.
This is to say nothing of the health effects associated with driving everywhere
instead of walking. All that driving brings us back to global warming. Fossil
fuels are implicated in what appears to be significant human-induced
climate change. Everyone I know professes to worry about this, but lets face it:
nothing but drastically higher prices will deter most of us from consuming
more carbon-based energy. Meanwhile, oil prices remain distressingly low.
Adjusted for inflation, remember, prices peaked some 25 years ago. HIGHER
prices have worked wonders before. Today, Americans can generate a
dollar of gross domestic product using just half the energy required in
1973, that watershed year of the oil embargo and lines at gas stations. In
countries where energy is more expensive, a dollar of G.D.P. requires
considerably less energy still. Unlike a tax, moreover, higher prices have the

advantage of applying all over the world, to everyone. The burden of higher oil
prices, unfortunately, will fall most heavily on the worlds poor but then again, so
would the burden of climate change. And surely the poor would benefit from
technologies that provide alternatives to fossil fuels.