MAKING CRUDE JOKES
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• Surprise, surprise, diesel prices are going up again. Respected oil industry analyst John Hall is convinced that the "oil companies are banging up their prices like mad, using any excuse".
Don't worry, say the producers, bulk dery prices will not be hit as hard as petrol pump prices. Big deal. They seem to forget that this week's price increase is the third in less than a month and that crude oil prices last week peaked at a 17-month high.
Haulage rates do not increase as rapidly or as consistently. When your trucking counterpart up the road raises his tariff, do you automatically put up your prices in line? Hauliers, of course, work in a deregulated and competitive marketplace. Oil companies strongly deny hiding behind the powerful mask of an illegal, price-fixing cartel: and there has never been any evidence to prove them wrong.
The big brewers made the same excuses for years, and look what the Government has decided to do to their so-called "tied pubs." The oil companies are once again in the firing line of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission — following previous probes in 1965 and 1979 — and this time,, the mood of the nation could be against them.
The root of the problem is that everybody feels powerless to protest. Who sets the real price of oil? Is it the rugby scrum forces at play in the Rotterdam spot market? The holing of an Exxon Valdez supertanker off the Alaskan coast? The quotas imposed by OPEC? Certainly it could not be a small group of major suppliers with a 60% stranglehold of the market getting together for a chat now and then, could it?
Crude oil is declining in quality as the draining of the world's natural resources goes on, and Friends of the Earth has been looking at the dery situation too this week. It is concerned about exhaust emmission standards and its "diesel alert" campaign will monitor truck pollution in 60 UK cities.
FoE wants Britain to adopt the kind of tough, no-nonense emmission standards that the United States has imposed on its truck industry.
The environmentalists are clearly expecting howls of protest from the road transport industry, and no doubt they will be proved correct. But just for once, why not assume that the green guys are good guys and that they could be in the right?
We can all be certain of one thing. Any measures to improve fuel quality at source will be instantly reflected in dery prices, across the board. Any measures forcing truck operators to clean up their act will not appear so quickly or so readily in the industry's rate structures. You pay once, and they you pay again.