A fool and his money
Two cures for the oil crisis
Bernard Hollowood
I suppose we can thank the bomb for twenty-nine years of comparative peace. And I'm quite sure that the sheikhs can thank the bomb for the West's docile acceptance of their staggering five-fold increase in the price of oil. The Europe of forty years ago would have reacted to the economic calamity by organising a crusade against the oil powers of the Middle East, which would have been occupied and controlled in the interests of world trade and international harmony.
There are hotheads in the West who are so angered by the profiteering Arabs that they would risk total war in their determination to bring the oil countries to heel, and nothing is more certain than that military intervention would eventually let loose the dogs of nuclear war between Russia and the West. Fortunately the world's dependence upon Middle East oil will not last for ever. The OPEC decision of a year ago has prompted immense activity among geologists and oceanographers and prospecting has revealed dozens of new oilfields. China, it is now known, has deposit S at least six times as large as those beneath the bed of the North Sea, and the US is said to have untold riches waiting to be tapped on the Atlantic continental shelf.
In the meantime the economically illiterate continue to upbraid the Arabs for their inability to convert oil revenues into instant, magical relief for the Third World. The Arabs are now fantastically rich, so why don't they feed the hungry, house the homeless and relieve the world of all its shortages?
We should not be unduly surprised by this manifestation of ignorance: even today in Britain there are people who think that
Previous page
