As we struggle with high fuel prices and taxes intended to tackle global warming, Andrew English analyses three views of the future
By Andrew EnglishLast Updated: 6:49PM BST 09 Oct 2008
Electric car being charged, Paris Motor Show 2008 Photo: AFP
Prices going up at a petrol station in China. Photo: Getty Images
If you're staring at a fuel bill you can't afford, for a car you can't afford to tax, then welcome to the boracic-lint club. Just eight years into the millennium, oil prices have risen by 539 per cent; small wonder BP is earning profits of £42 million a day and it's only Russian petro-oligarchs and gas-company bosses who can afford to heat their houses. Car prices might have fallen over the last eight years, but they are now on their way back up and motoring taxes haven't fallen one iota. If you're the proud owner of a BMW road smoker, Range Rover or similar, then you're looking down the barrel of a very expensive future. Based on your car's carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions, your annual Vehicle Excise Duty bills will be rising to £455 in the next two years, not to mention up to £950 in showroom tax from 2010.
Then there are CO2-based parking charges, proposals for CO2-based congestion charges, low emissions zones and CO2-based company-fuel and company-car taxes and write-down allowances. And if that weren't weighing heavily on your wallet, there's also the meltdown in the financial markets and the threat of actual changes in the weather caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions and increased demand for raw materials, which is helping to fuel a speculation boom, spiralling prices and sparking guilt-racking food riots in parts of the world.
What halcyon days the turn of the millennium now seem. When atmosphere was something you paid extra for in the saloon bar. Nowadays you are lucky to find a local boozer. They've all going out of business as skint and depressed Britons head home to hide under the duvet with a four-pack of alcopops.
What's going on? Please don't tell me that all those expensive economists in the City have finally woken up to the finite supply of oil. Even assuming they were too lazy to read the Club of Rome's 1972 report, Limits To Growth, surely they heard Tower of Power's not-inconsiderable horn section blasting out There's Only So Much Oil In The Ground on the Urban Renewal album two years later: "There's only so much oil in the ground. Sooner or later there won't be none around. Alternate sources of power must be found. Cause there's only so much oil in the ground..."
If you really want to know what's going on, then a couple of books published this summer and a series of lectures by Ford's former chief engineer, Richard Parry Jones, are required reading and will also help you stave off the Monbiot tendency when it waves its climate-guilt voodoo stick in your face.
+ "Enemies of Progress – The Dangers Of Sustainability" by Austin Williams is published by Imprint Academic ISBN 9781845400989 at £8.95.
+ "Zoom – The Global Race To Fuel The Car Of The Future" by Iain Carson and Vijay V Vaitheeswaran is published by Hachette ISBN 9780446580045 at $27.99.
+ Richard Parry-Jones's lecture are being published as a series of essays in Autocar magazine; the first appeared on August 13.
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