Real barrel of trouble

www.edinburghnews.com CITY VIEW Peter Clarke

THE world’s oil markets seem to be registering rather more than the normal fears about Iraq. The price of oil is staying solidly above $30 a barrel.

Venezuela is barely supplying its normal volume of oil. Nigeria’s two million barrels a day looks dodgy and the northern hemisphere is having a severe cold spell which has driven up fuel consumption more than had been anticipated.

The only tangible news that will relieve the market is if the US announces releases some of its strategic petroleum reserve.

The Americans have 600 million barrels lying around the country. Everyone had assumed they would not be opened until the day a strike was launched on Baghdad. At present prices, the gesture of opening a few barrels may become necessary.

In the meantime, a world market price of $32 a barrel makes many marginal fields suddenly profitable again. Techniques of extraction are now so much more sophisticated it is possible to suck oil out of fields which had previously been abandoned. At $32 a barrel, many North Sea oil fields look worth opening up again.

Once again markets far removed from Iraq depend on political or military events.

Electric avenue

There will be many unintended consequences of London’s experiment in road pricing.

It will be some weeks before we can see the full effects but one early initiative looks like a winner. The authorities in London have waived the £5 a day congestion charge for electric vehicles. Electric cars have failed to become fashionable because they struggle to go above 50mph but in urban landscapes where can you possibly achieve 50mph? Four miles an hour is often impressive.

Very quickly people will buy electric cars with a new enthusiasm and it already seems car hire firms in London are bringing in more electric vehicles.

If or when Edinburgh introduces a similar road pricing scheme all the arguments of ecological virtue lead towards a similar concession for free movement for electric cars.

The whole initiative of pricing this valuable asset of urban road space is going to reveal extraordinary new economic truths. Already civil engineers are arguing they could build underground roads to match the underground railways. We’re on the start of a large adventure.

Food for thought

NOT a single complaint has been made under the Supermarkets Code of Practice for their dealing with suppliers.

This investigation was meant to give flesh to Gordon Brown’s inchoate thoughts about "rip-off Britain". The Office of Fair Trading would like to have reprimanded the supermarkets for their purchasing habits but could find no one to offer a complaint of any nature.

Does this mean food suppliers are quite content with the supermarkets procurement policies? It’s just a possibility but the greater likelihood has to be that no one was going to murmur even the smallest peep of a complaint for fear of offending the companies on whom they depend.

Once again the OFT seems blind in one eye. The price of British groceries could tumble by 40 per cent, easily, if the restrictions of the Common Agricultural Policy were lifted or scrapped.

We do have a "rip-off Britain" but it is one at which the Government connives. It was only prudent of the OFT not to mention it yet again.