Airstrip One

Oils well that ends well

An interesting article on oil security from Fortune. I do have a couple of quibbles. It was not primarily the oil price that pushed Britain into recession, but rather the inappropriately high interest rates (and so the price of future investment) set by the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Secondly it talks of various fancy mechanisms to wean America off oil. Most involve increasing it's price or the attractiveness of alternatives. But surely a crisis, or even the expectation of a crisis, would do that through the price mechanism? Why not just leave it to the market?