Running on Empty: Bristol Runs Dry

bristol | globalisation | news report Tuesday June 17, 2008 09:01 by byker

After a few days of protest and blockade, petrol stations in Bristol finally begin to run dry.

As I cycled home yesterday I spotted the ESSO garage on Park Row was closed with a sign saying "Sorry No Fuel", I noticed that the fuel protest and the blockade Shell petrol depots around the country, must have started to bike locally.

Running on Empty

This was the picture in the paper on Sunday;

"Tempers frayed and frustration rose with the lengths of the queues on garage forecourts yesterday, with people hurling insults and vehicles literally scraping past each other as motorists jostled to get to the pumps.

With striking workers continuing to blockade Shell petrol depots around the country, there were growing reports of panic buying and people travelling dozens of miles just to fill up. Supermarkets have said they struggled to meet demand, and some garages are predicting they will run out of fuel.

More than 100 petrol stations had closed by noon yesterday, as strike action began to bite. And in the 24 hours from noon on Friday to yesterday lunchtime, demand for petrol was 25 per cent higher than for the same period last week, according to government figures passed to The Independent on Sunday.

Huge stocks of petrol are already stuck at fuel depots as a result of a national strike that has seen hundreds of drivers support calls not to cross picket lines." (1)

This means that Bristol has what, four day of petrol before the system starts to collapse. Is this a taste of the world to come?

"Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.
...
Our efficient energy and food systems are perfect examples of how monolithic and brittle our infrastructure can become. Political turmoil in the Middle East, storms ravaging offshore oil wells, refinery fires, terrorism, and any number of other easily imaginable, even inevitable disruptions send gas prices soaring and suddenly our oil-dependent economy is pitched into a crisis. Because there is no readily available alternative to how we fuel our way of life -- no resilience -- our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us especially vulnerable to crisis. Our food system is likewise vulnerable, since it is so dependent on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and relies on cheap and consistent supplies of gas for farm machinery and shipping." (2)

I also can't help but notice the irony that this petrol station is next to the Panoramic, where Tony Blair owns a couple of flats, a man who has done much - via his failed policies in the middle east - to create the instability that has lead to high oil prices.

(1) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tempers-....html
(2) http://tomdispatch.com/post/174826/chip_ward_how_effici...rophe