The world’s largest oil field, the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, which supplies some 7 per cent of the world’s oil, was discovered right back in 1948. Go back to previous oil squeezes and China’s oil imports were relatively tiny.The other is that the underlying supply situation is tighter than it used to be. Intensive efforts at finding new oil supplies have shown up some decent new fields and the oil companies have become better at getting oil out of difficult places. The latest surge in oil prices may well turn out to be a blessing in disguise – although it may seem a pretty thick disguise to anyone filling up their car this week with petrol at 83p a litre.
Oil is now more than $40 a barrel. That is the highest it has been since 1990, although if you allow for the fall in the value of the dollar since then in real terms, it is still some way from that peak.

What is different now (and different from the two oil price peaks before that in the middle 1970s and early 1980s) is that oil seems likely to remain expensive for the foreseeable future.There are two reasons for that. One is that demand has been boosted by the surge in living standards in China, with that nation now replacing Japan as the second-largest oil user in the world after the US. The speeders say politicians don’t give a toss about the public good or saving lives. They draw on the nihilism about politics that is spreading like black tar over our culture to claim that Blair and Gordon Brown – “the road bandits” – are only interested in raking in cash from speeding fines. Any claims about dead kids are self-serving lies; anybody who falls for them is mocked as “na?”.This is a way of shaking responsibility off motorists like dust from an old suit. It is an attempt to change the subject, from the hard evidence about saved lives to an evidence-free debate about the motives of politicians.Cars bring out the worst in this brand of excuse-making individualism.

We all know that carbon emissions are contributing to global warming and ecocide. But do we use our cars less for pointless journeys? Do we even eschew petrol-intensive four-wheel-drives for sane cars? No; it’s me, me, me, baby, and – hey! – I hear that global warming is all a myth anyway.But after all the self-justifying lies, we still have to breathe the same air, use the same roads and live in the same country. However much the speed freaks of Middle England want to imagine they live exclusively in individualised steel cocoons, a speeding car doesn’t discriminate. There is such a thing as society, and if the Government doesn’t slow us down, nobody will.j.hari independent.co.uk
More from Johann Hari. The pro-speeding lobby accuses everyone else – particularly the Government and police – of being the ones motivated by selfishness. Some liberties are so fundamental they must be absolute: the freedom to vote, the right to free speech, and the right to a fair trial. Does anybody seriously think driving at 40mph through a residential area should be the fourth item on this list?Very few people will admit (even to themselves) that they are acting purely out of selfishness, putting their own mild, momentary convenience over the possible death of an innocent person Instead, we all create excuses.

Your liberty to speed has to be weighed against my liberty not to be run over. In a bizarre insult to our war heroes, a Telegraph columnist recently compared the fight against the cameras to the fight against the Nazis, and begged his readers – on the 60th anniversary of D-Day – to remember “the price of freedom”.Liberty is the most important political value of all, but it is puerile politics to deny that sometimes liberties compete. (Back then, there were other, very different problems, many just as serious. This shouldn’t turn into an exercise in bogus conservative nostalgia, and Tony Blair was eye- burstingly unhelpful when he used Sixties-bashing rhetoric in a speech on this subject a fortnight ago.)The Government too often acts as though this increased responsibility is only for the poor. Yes, it is an important issue for the council estates, but it’s also needed for the Volvo estates and the landed estates.