Matt Ridley on why falling oil prices are unambiguously good – they make the world richer and fairer

Via Mark Perry of "Carpe Diem.".

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Matt Ridley has a great column on why cheap oil is unambiguously good news – it makes the world richer and fairer, and in the process allows us to abolish much more poverty, disease and misery. Here’s an excerpt:

So ingrained is the bad-news bias of the intelligentsia that the plummeting price of oil has mostly been discussed in terms of its negative effect on the budgets of oil producers, both countries and companies. We are allowed to rejoice only to the extent that we think it is a good thing that the Venezuelan, Russian and Iranian regimes are most at risk, which they are.

Yet by far the greater benefit of the oil price fall comes from the impact on consumers. Making this essential resource cheaper allows everybody, whatever their nationality, to spend less money on dull things like heat, transport, metal and plastic, which leaves them more money for things like movies, holidays and pets, which gives other people new jobs, which raises everybody’s living standards.

The price of Brent crude oil has fallen from about $115 a barrel in June to about $85 today (see chart above, prices are now below $85 per barrel and the lowest in almost 4 years – since November 2010). That will make a tank of gasoline cheaper (though not by as much as it should, because of taxes) but it will also make everything from chairs to chips to chiropody cheaper too, because the cost of energy is incorporated into the cost of every good and service we buy. The impact of this cost deflation will dwarf any effect of, say, a fall in the price of BP shares in your pension plan.

The industrial revolution itself was built around abundant cheap energy, mainly in the form of coal, which enabled mechanization, which vastly amplified the productivity of the average worker and therefore his income. Today a typical British family of four uses as much energy as if it had 400 slaves in the back room pedaling eight-hour shifts on exercise bicycles. It would use even more if it also fed those slaves!

The falling oil price is largely the Americans’ fault. By reinventing the extraction process for first gas, then oil, with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, engineers have almost doubled the country’s output of oil in six years. That ingenuity was made possible by the high price of oil, which promised fabulous riches to those who could get oil out of shale, but it is no longer dependent on the high price of oil. It is often said that the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices and so it has proved.

But is cheap fossil fuel not bad news for the climate? A new paper in Nature magazine argues that when the gas boom sparked by fracking goes global, prices will fall fast, economic growth will accelerate and so we will end up using more energy and producing more emissions than before, even if we give up coal. It forgets to mention that if we get that much richer, we will also abolish much more poverty, disease and misery, and have the investment funds to invent new, cheap and low-carbon forms of energy too.

HT: Warren Smith"