Oil prices still aren’t high enough By Derek Brower, journalist YOU SPEND just over £1 ($1.95) and you can transport four or five people, and their luggage, about seven miles across the countryside. In those terms a litre of petrol in the UK, where gasoline prices are among the highest in the world, is good value, allowing remarkable mobility, in comfort, and all for the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola. It’s not quite that simple, of course, because despite the claims of its advertisers Coca-Cola doesn’t make the world go around. Oil does. Look around you: everything you see depends, in some way or another, on the petroleum industry. Anything that needed to be transported, anything that is made of plastic or other synthetic materials — it all relies on the extraction of hydrocarbons and their conversion into energy.