High oil prices are good news 03 July 08

Just listened to your piece on The World Tonight, and I wanted to say it was brilliant! Well done for injecting a different and more sane perspective into the airwaves. I hope a 4×4 doesn’t assassinate you tomorrow. Keep up the excellent work.

Well, well Mark Lynas at Car Giant! More my territory I would have thought as a … “trying very hard to retire from the motor trade” ... second hand car dealer. (I don’t entertain anyone who wants a car I don’t approve of!)

Very good punchy piece Mark – well done. There is a clear shift in demand to smaller engined/diesel cars and more and more folk know about CO2 emissions ratings. While prices are dropping for many cars the “sensible stuff” still makes the money.

However as a form of rationing dramatic price rises for oil and other fossil fuels will have effects which are socially unjust. Combining red with green is not easy.

Douglas Coker Enfield Green Party

Well done – and if you want to feel happy about Ryan Air shares …

http://killik.sharecast.com/cgi-bin/sharecast/security.cgi?csi=13366

Well done. High oil prices are good news in the perspective of Western transport emissions. It will help us make a shift in the this sector. But coal is still plentiful – and on the rise. What we need is a new measuring stick for progress.

Economic growth based on bad debt is the most recent fad. Growth based on fossil fuel is a longer term fashion, equally shortsighted and more dangerous.

I agree with Douglas on equity. We rich have used up all the cheap oil and have left none for the poor to use. They will never have access to a commodity that some have been happy to waste, on 4×4’s in cities for instance.

A big shift to things like coal-to-liquids and deforestation biofuels is not just a big danger, as Dave Strahan said in your interview, but happening – http://tinyurl.com/65cmg5.

How do we regulate internationally against this?

But Mark, you said you were inclined to now laugh at 4×4 drivers.

But they are still speeding up and down the British motorways at very high speeds in those monsterous vehicles. The reason being that many have their fuel fully funded by their employers. I suspect the tax bands for car fuel has failed to reflect these high market prices for road fuel. So the squandering of this precious fuel goes on. What will future generations think of us for this gross stupidity?

The government needs to act on company supplied road fuel.