So tonight the price of petrol in South Africa goes up 50 cents. Let's put just tonight's price rise into perspective. For every 2 litres of petrol you put into your tank, you pay an extra R1. So if you put 50 litres of petrol in your car, you've basically bought an extra movie ticket, or a hamburger, with the extra cash - except of course you never get to watch the movie, or eat the hamburger. And this happens every time you fill up from tonight onwards.
On SABC TV news the fuel price hike was the top story. There is a lot of concern about the impact, with economists citing long haul trucking companies and bus companies starting to struggle. Plenty more is on the cards - airlines for one, supermarkets for another. Then, 10 minutes later into the bulletin, car makers start whining about declining production. The stats show year on year figures declining from 50 000 units a month, to 30-something thousand. However, they say, export volumes are still growing, and are now at 23 000 units a month? Errrrr...I wonder how many people have any idea how incredibly stupid the psychology is here. We don't like the fuel prices going up, and now we're not happy because we can't make more cars. Can anyone be any more cluelessand disconnected to reality?
The fuel price is going up - oh no, why, anger. Then - production in car volumes is going up - oh no, why, anger. I'd really like to know - if SA produces 50 000 units - that's cars that drink petrol - a month, how many units (that's cars that drink petrol) do other economies make, like South Korea, and Japan, and Germany, and the USA and China, and India. Every new vehicle is a new user. That's not just demand continuing as it is now, but growing demand for that new vehicle for the rest of its productive life. And of course the last thing anyone is thinking is - is it such a great idea to continue on the way we are going? I mean, are things ever likely to improve if we just continue building cars? Shall I answer the question for you? No.
I've also seen apparently intelligent journalists, economists - experts - saying that 'we can't do anything about high fuel prices'. Ordinary people say this a lot too. Bullshit. Actually, we can do a lot. Price is about supply and demand. Supply is struggling. Yet no one is starting conversations about changing our demand. Changing what you do every single day. From the ordinary things - like how far you drive to work, to car pooling, efficient driving habits (reduce speed, pump your cars tyres, take out stuff that doesn't need to be in your car) to the more extreme, such as cancelling NASCAR and Formula 1, restructuring our living arrangements (where w elive, how we live), investing in rail. You just don't hear that because everyone assumes - incorrectly - that this can somehow carry on and on. It's called wishful thinking. It's fantasy. It comes from watching too many movies and TV. It comes from a public used to getting what it wants, used to convenience, and utterly unused being told to change, being told to do something about an obvious problem.
The fact that obesity now is one of the world's chronic problems, while people are starving to death in other parts of the world, tells you how shizophrenic and sick our thinking is. It's not a normal world.
While everyone hopes that prices will magically come down, and the Antartic will start spewing oil, people just don't get that that's not going to happen. We are experiencing a major, and fundamental shift. We can adapt, or have those changes forced upon us. The question is, when do we wake up to reality?
When I drove back to Johannesburg on Sunday, at night, I got a gut feel sense about what impact oil actually has. I saw a faraway flame turning a large amount of sky around a Sasolburg chimney into sulphurous yellow daylight. The plant is designed to refine fossil fuels into stuff we can put in our cars, and burn, stuff that goes into our homes to light up our TV's and lights. It occurred to me, driving over the dark highway, that every light on every car, even the lights that show us our speed, whether we are braking, the galaxy of city lights making the sky glow a dull moony white above the city - every single light burns thanks to oil and coal pumped out of the ground, sucked and dredged out of the Earth and burned. And once it is gone, it's gone. We're burning vast amounts every day now, and every day, more and more machines line up to be marched into service.
On the highway I felt I couldn't imagine the huge cityscape of Johannesburg's lights, the long ruby snakes and glittering rows of diamonds burning this bright for much longer. And that gut feel happens to be on the money. Eskom has just announced a new load shedding schedule. And I predict that this year we will experience fuel shortages. That means the equivalent of power cuts, except we won't be able to power (run) our cars. For a few days at a time. And then a week. And then longer. It will happen this year, and if I am wrong, then I'll be glad. But it will happen eventually, and probably sooner than we think. Already experts are citing 'surprise'. The surprises have just started.
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