Plenty of blame for high oil prices

May 22, 2006. 01:00 AM

As the price of sweet crude oil hovers around $70 (U.S.) a barrel, Canadians are feeling it at the pumps, paying about $1 a litre for gasoline.

Many of us wonder how this could have happened. We're quick to blame unrest in Nigeria, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and Iran's unsettling commitment toward its nuclear research.

But the fact is, developed countries are squarely to blame. And it rests on the shoulders of the big oil companies, auto manufacturers and, you, the consumer.

The oil companies are at fault for steering consumers and industry to their products, limiting the development of alternatives and even buying up patents for cutting-edge technology, all to shore up their profits.

Ditto for the auto industry. Finally, we are seeing hybrid cars with gasoline and electric engines come onto the market in growing numbers. We should have moved past the internal combustion engine at least 20 years ago. Look at the time lines.

In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler invented what is often recognized as the prototype of the modern gasoline engine.

Henry Ford introduced the famous Model T in 1908, nearly two decades after two French companies, Panhard et Levassor and Peugeot, began producing automobiles.

For more than 100 years, we've been driving around in vehicles powered by internal combustion engines.

Scientific knowledge doubles every 10 years (a conservative estimate), yet we still rely on gasoline-powered cars, just like the auto pioneers of the late 1800s.

In that same time period, the Wright brothers took to the skies; we moved from biplanes to single-wing aircraft; from propeller-driven flight to jet-powered flight; from aircraft to spacecraft; from unmanned spaceflight to manned; from gazing at the moon at night to actually setting foot on it.

The power of our home computers today dwarfs the rooms of computers that NASA utilized to get man to the moon and back again 37 years ago.

As everything else in our lives evolved, one of our most heavily utilized tools was left in the stone age.

The biggest recent changes to the automobile industry were the development of the minivan and the SUV.

Don't blame the oil-producing nations for that. Look in the mirror.

But don't linger too long.

If the developed nations, from politician to corporate executive to daily consumer, don't act soon, our way of life as we know it will run out of gas, with little in the way of alternatives.

This is an edited version of an editorial from Friday's Barrie Examiner.