Word: pricing
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...Wednesday afternoon, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a single trader bid up oil until it finally hit the price we'd all been waiting for: $100 a barrel. Driven by trends both short-term (political instability in Africa and speculation) and long-term (voracious new demand from China and India), oil has quadrupled since 2003, doubled since the beginning of 2007 and now reached triple digits for the first time since it began trading on the exchange began...
...price had dipped back down to $99.62, and oil still has yet to break its all-time inflation-adjusted high of $102.81 (set in April 1980 after the Iranian revolution). "One hundred dollars is a symbolic number," says John DeCicco, a senior fellow at Environmental Defense. But unlike past eras of high-altitude oil prices, caused by short-term disruptions in supply, today there are simply more countries demanding more oil than ever before, and that's unlikely to change soon. Gasoline prices lag behind oil in the U.S. - a gallon currently goes for an average of $3.05 nationwide...
High petroleum prices might hit your wallet hard, but $100-a-barrel oil has some environmentalists quietly celebrating. The more expensive oil gets, the more attractive alternative - and climate-friendly - fuels become. Biofuels that would be buried by $17-a-barrel crude - the price as recently as November 2001 - are suddenly competitive when oil is in the triple digits. Ultra-efficient cars, public transit, plug-in hybrids - they all become better investments as oil gets and stays expensive. Global greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed over the past few decades on the back of relatively cheap oil, but as the price...
That means even though high-cost oil seems here to stay, governments still need to act to send long-term signals to alternative energy investors. Price matters less than certainty, knowledge that an outlay in clean power will still be worthwhile 5, 10 or 15 years down the road. That could take the form of a carbon tax that sets a floor on oil prices, a cap-and-trade system that could do virtually the same thing or mandated standards that require the use of less carbon-intensive fuels. (California attempted to go the last route, mandating steep reductions...
Since Iran has demonstrated its contempt for international nuclear requirements and the potential to arm itself as a significant threat to the rest of the world, I would feel a lot safer with a policy that denies Iran any nuclear capabilities. I hope the price we pay later for letting Iran off the hook will not be too high. Rick Donald, PORTLAND, MAINE...