UAL and others are furloughing because of high oil prices. Is it temporary market supply and demand? Or is it planned government oil policy to bend to environmentalists?
Uh oh,
I might have answered my own question here......
The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807... [their IICC commission] in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.
It goes on to say that gov policy makers give a lot of weight to the London Society. Skip down to Living on the Ice Shelf, and if you can wade through it, it's clear that Author Davis won't be happy until we are all grounded:
Tomgram: Mike Davis, Welcome to the Next Epoch
Pilot groups need more pro-active lobbying of politicians to exclude public transport like airlines from oil company price gouging.
This is why I'm pro Union. Maybe Management and Unions can work together on this one. Give a management sanctioned PA asking SLF to lobby for exclusion of airlines to fuel taxes to impove safety. Hand out petitions.
What do you think?