There;s an online initiative afoot to
have people target the two biggest oil companies operating in Canada
((Petro Canada and Esso), boycotting them until they bring the price
of a litre of gas down to a dollar. The assumption is that oil
companies are in cahoots to keep the price artificially high and we
can break their “cartel” by forcing some companies to break
rank. Related to this is the idea that speculation is causing the
price hike we're seeing.
If those were were the causes of the
high prices, this would be a great strategy. But the increase isn't mainly
due to them. It's the rising cost of discovering,
extracting and transporting oil that's behind the hike. Peak oil is
here and oil prices are not to go down – ever – with the
exception of some surface price volatility.
It's a natural reaction when hard times
hit to look for someone to blame. Instead of thinking we're the 99%,
look at what we can do, there's a thread of “look at what the 1% is
doing to powerless us.” We actually do have power if we're ready to
use it.
That power comes from person to person
support and work together, from imagining and building what we want
for a more beautiful world, from developing greater self-reliance and
“community glue”. It won't help if we ignore reality – the end
of growth as we've known it – and find a scapegoat for our
unwillingness to see. What's truer is that 100% of us have benefited
from cheap oil – it's fueled every part of our modern world and the
lifestyle we enjoy.
If there's an upside to less available
oil is that we may put less of it into the atmosphere, even though
what we've already placed there is going to be a central fact of life
for future generations.
