Simon Barber
25 July 2008
column
Johannesburg — THE rising cost of energy is causing pain to those, chiefly the poor, on whom the costs of adjustment sit the heaviest. With that caveat, and it is a big one, oil at $130 a barrel or higher is a good thing. Our children will be the better off for it.
This week, I would have been happy to see fuel at $500 a barrel. At that price I would probably have been spared from having to fly to Minneapolis and Miami as part of a mission to sell folks thereabouts on the joys of investing in, and buying from, SA.
Don't get me wrong. The case we were making was impeccable, inspiring even, and Minneapolis and Miami are splendid places, packed with wonderful people open to the case that there are indeed fortunes to be made in and with SA. It was just that getting to and from them narrowed the mind severely. If my dog saw what we had to go through, he would probably have felt inspired to launch a society for the prevention of cruelty to humans.
Suffice to say, none of the flights I was on got me to my ticketed destination at the first try. In every instance we were diverted to other fields where we sat on the tarmac for hours on end with as little hope of escape as a cow awaiting slaughter on an industrial-scale feed lot.
As the price of fuel has risen, America's airlines have had to become ever more creative to preserve their margins. Theirs is the creativity of Torquemada. To fly here is to get a taste of what it's like to be sent to Parris Island for basic training as a US Marine, but without creature comforts such as food. In fact, there were times this week when six months in Baghdad would have been a blessed relief.
Which begs me to ask: could we not have avoided all the aerial Bataan death marches we had to endure between the networking sessions in the beautiful cities we visited? Could we not have formed all the necessary bonds via some grown-up variant of Facebook? Did we really have to press each other's flesh to do business?
I hope we can get to no on this question before long. I hope that we can learn to discover each other and hold useful meetings without having to leave our hulking carbon footprints all over the planet's carpet. Could we not add that to the list of other benefits exorbitant petrol is bringing in its wake, as recently tabulated by Foreign Policy magazine?
These include the fact that my teenage son can no longer afford to drive his absurdly overpowered car. Traffic deaths in the US are plummeting, down nearly 10% in the first five months of this year from the same period last year.
Americans took 85-million more rides on public conveyances in the first quarter of this year than in the same period last year. According to the US transportation department, American vehicles have travelled 23-billion fewer kilometres than expected since November 2006.
This is good for America's waistline. Economist Charles Courtemarche, of Washington University in St Louis, has calculated that for every dollar the real price of petrol goes up, the proportion of Americans who are obese goes down 16% after seven years.
People have to start moving under their own steam, and as it costs more to get food to the table, portions shrink.
Weighing less, Americans will have to import less oil because it will take less energy to move them from A to B. If they weighed the same as they did in 1960, according to a study in The Engineering Economist, the annual saving in petrol would be of the order of 4-billion litres a year.
One other benefit of spiralling fuel costs - around the country, the New York Times reports, police departments are turfing officers out of their petrol-guzzling squad cars to walk and cycle their beats. That translates into safer streets. And thinner cops.
Barber is US country manager for the International Marketing Council.
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