you have got petrol cheap up there. i filled up at morrisons, salop at 115.9, it is 122.9 in devon

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Fair play – im glad some politians care about us ordinary folk

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The whole point of this tax hike is to encourage us to buy more efficient ‘Green’ vehicles and make use of public transport. Do these politicians ever get out into the rural areas of the country and see how pityful and expensive the public transport is? The 2nd hand car market has crashed any residual money left in our vehicles is minimal, so we have to spend money we don’t have to purchase the greener vehicles…. wake up Gordon! until the USA and China decide to cut their emmissions your efforts are negated…..give us a break

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Councillor Armstrong should know that the reason for rising oil prices is not the UK government’s hunger for fossil fuel tax money, but the fact that human societies are seeing the first evidence that global oil production is reaching or has reached its all-time maximum and is beginning its inevitable decline as demand booms worldwide. ie we have reached or we are very likely to soon reach PEAK OIL.

One way to respond to this situation is to do what West Lothian Council has done, and what Councillor Armstrong is proposing: demand that the UK government prolongs our oil-addiction and takes vital money away from our health service or education system to help subsidise consumption of fuels, which we all know are contributing to climate change. As the Stern Report showed, however, the costs of this approach will be borne by our children and our children’s children.

Another way to respond to this is to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the face and adopt the strategy of the TRANSITION movement; that is to say, get together as a community, share ideas about how to deal with these issues creatively and re-localize and future-proof our economy.

As author Richard Heinberg (‘The Party’s Over’, ‘Powerdown’, ‘Peak Everything’ and ‘The Oil Depletion Protocol’) says, ‘our societal dependencies on oil, coal, and gas constitute an enormous collective vulnerability since there are no ready substitutes capable of replicating their services…. Unless we wean ourselves from these fuels proactively, societal support systems will crash just as the global climate gets pushed past a tipping point…. Depletion and climate issues converge to make a deliberate, co-operative transition away from fossil fuels the centre-piece of our human survival strategy for the remainder of the 21st century…. Economic re-localisation will be one of the inevitable impacts of the end of cheap transportation fuels.’ (quoted from The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins pp9 + 10).

I don’t see how the West Lothian proposal deals with this ‘enormous collective vulnerability’.

It just puts off the inevitable to a future day.

Surely the longer we delay confronting this big question, the more vulnerable we leave our rural economy to rising fuel costs in the future.

Sweden aims to be fossil-fuel-free by 2020 and has started the transition already.

With Arctic ice melting faster than even the most dire scientific predictions, is it not time that we followed Sweden’s lead and finally started to make our economy more resilient to peak oil?

Rather than a cut in fuel duty on fossil fuels, which we must urgently move away from as a society, would it not be a better idea for rural businesses to have more access to capital and credit, so that they can invest in future-proofing their businesses against the inevitable rises in oil and gas prices that have been widely predicted?

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Correction.

According to yesterday’s Guardian newspaper, John McCain wants 65% cuts in CO2 emissions by 2050.

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