Drive around Shepparton and you are regularly reminded that the cost of living is rising, seriously.
And that reminder slams into your consciousness every time you pass a service station.
Fuel costs, in colloquial terms, are going through the roof.
It only seems like yesterday that fuel for my car was costing just a dollar a litre, but obviously that wasn’t ‘yesterday’, as fuel costs have made up an increasingly large chunk of family budgets for a long time now.
I’m far from sure what’s really happening.
But, thinking about that again, maybe I do know what is going on — we are at the end game of the market system, the so-called ‘invisible hand’ of the market system has become the whip hand and we are being driven to accept prices that are unreasonable, unfair and unconscionable in every sense.
Is what we are forced to pay for fuel at the pump a response to increased production costs?
Of course not, and only last week Guardian environment reporter Fiona Harvey noted that the world’s oil companies were having their best year ever.
She reported that five of the biggest oil companies had a combined profit of $170 billion so far this year, suggesting the price at the pump is much higher than it need be.
And the number, she pointed out, is most certainly higher, as some oil companies are nationalised and so not required to report profits.
So as you cruise around Shepparton contemplating where you should go for your best deal remember that a BP executive recently said: “We are getting more cash than we know what to do with.”
So, I wonder, if companies are getting more money than they know what to do with, why are we being forced to dig so deep into our pockets when we pull up to a pump at the local servo?
However, it’s important we don’t direct our displeasure at our local servo owner/operators, as it is the oil companies themselves that control the prices and are wallowing in wealth.
This is a tragedy for many reasons, among them that it hurts many people, particularly the poor, it drives up costs, it worsens inflation and at a time when we should be doing all we can to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, it has become a hugely profitable investment.
Or maybe this is something of a ‘last hurrah’ for the fossil fuel companies, which have known for decades that what they do is worsening climate change and are watching as country after country sets a date, often only years away, when the sale of cars with internal combustion engines will be banned.
The oil companies, of course, have us in something of choke hold; since early last century we have been told, over and over again, that getting about in a privately owned fossil fuel-powered vehicle enhanced our status — making us more acceptable, agreeable people — was more efficient, enriched us personally, made the world a better place and made us happier.
Some of those things can be shown to be true, to some degree, but the real cost from a century of fossil fuel motoring is now revealing itself as the climate emergency.
And so what do we do?
Well, there’s human-powered transport (walking and cycling), public transport and electric cars.
The first is available to most everyone, the second ranges from spectacular to rather patchy and the third, the electric car, is expensive and so beyond the reach of most, although the cost is coming down.
Again, what do we do?
Keep up the pressure on all levels of government (local, state and federal) to ensure our towns and cities are designed and built to allow for walking and cycling, and knock on doors everywhere, agitating for improvements to every aspect of public transport and pressing any way we can for improvements to electric vehicles.
And, of course, if walking and cycling became an everyday thing, public transport reached a hitherto unseen level of sophistication and electric cars became more commonplace, then these halcyon days would be, for the oil companies, little more than a memory and we could travel around Shepparton without being constantly whipped by this ‘invisible hand’.