Something jumped out of the comments over in my previous article (It’s A Grim World) that caught my attention. Nia pulled out some headlines, and one of them was about rising petrol prices being inevitable. I haven’t read the article (pah, that would be research), but I know from experience that most people in the UK see high petrol prices in the UK as a bad thing.

I don’t.

I would love to see all the vehicles on the roads running from hydrogen fuel cells, since that would stop all of the point-of-use pollution issues, and would make masks for cyclists a thing of the past. By using a more interchangable form of energy (the electricity needed to generate the hydrogen), we could then use wind, wave, nuclear, solar or what ever source of energy we like to (indirectly) power all the vehicles – whereas at the moment we don’t have a choice. But the thing holding it all back is the low cost of petrol. Yes, even in Britain, petrol is still a cheap fuel.

A related problem is that we don’t have a fall-back plan for when petrol supplies are interupted. We can’t use our power stations to run the cars, we can’t build more wind turbines to make up for any shortfalls. And we can’t, no matter how hard we try, find vast oil reserves somewhere handy and under our control (Essex, perhaps) – we rely utterly on transporting fuel from parts of the world that we’d rather hold at arms length. But if we moved away from depending on petrol (and diesel, nitpickers), we’d have plenty of alternatives if one energy source was affected.

And finally, buying vast quantities of oil from politically dodgy areas of the world isn’t something we should be particularly proud of. Huge amounts of money are given to corrupt regimes, and help fund rather distastful societies around the globe. If I had a car, I’d much rather that buying fuel funded more wind turbines in the North Sea or solar plants in southern France, than funding the (inevitably) corrupt power sharers emerging in Sudan.

So I’d be quite happy to see pump prices hit one, or even two pounds per litre. But I’m in somewhat of a minority on this one.