Originally Posted by
Biggus
Further encouragement for countries to wean themselves off Middle Eastern oil and gas.
Obviously nobody learned much from the spike in oil prices (around 300%) in 1973/74 as a result of the Arab/Israeli War....only 50 years to prepare, obviously not enough time for Western governments.
If only we had a secure source of oil and gas more local to ourselves, eh Mr Miliband....
We pay world prices for that oil and gas and even if output can be cranked up instantly, it would have to be an extreme amount to affect the world price. So it won't do us a great deal of good.
On the other hand, we can install a lot of wind and solar quite quickly, get the new transmission lines built, accelerate the move to heat pumps, push the EV transition harder, get homes properly insulated. .... In fact there are 100s of things that can be done - we have many different directions that we can attack the problem from simultaneously and all with an end result that we will not need oil in significant amounts ever again. While we're doing all of this we're spending money in the UK, investing in the UK, developing exportable technology here. In fact you could almost paint it as a kind of industrial revolution Mk2 except that this time we didn't start it.