The Pirates of Petrol

Petrol is outrageously cheap in Iran and I think it makes perfect sense not to subsidize it to the level that it is. It is ridiculous for a giant oil exporter to spend so much money importing petrol while so much of it gets into hands of smugglers who pass it to neighboring countries or gets burnt by old, inefficient cars. Rationalizing the crazy level of internal consumption should have done so long ago....

Knowing that the subject of the above paragraph is Iran, can automatically suggest that things would not be as simple as they should...petrol price is such a sensitive issue that all previous governments did not dare making any drastic increase...they feared what happened in Tehran last night (see pictures).

First of all, I do not understand the Iranian mob! so you collected some more liters of cheap petrol, that means a couple of more kilometers!! and burning petrol pumps! who are they punishing? but at the same time, it is so much to expect from the middle-class and bottom level of Iranian economy to bare this after such a dreadful decline in the economy and the level of unemployment and inflation...and now  shadow of more sanctions...but it is not a big deal...I am sure Iranians will get used to it...I am sure many of my fellow countrymen will consider selling their 1970's monstrous Chevrolet Blazers! or think twice before wandering around the streets Thursday nights...

Instead of global slogans against other countries and spending billions for second hand Russian nuclear plants, shall we make some more refineries? first things first...

Comments

[a Duoist]

Iran, although the world's fourth largest oil exporter with the world's second largest proven oil and natural gas reserves, has only one old, dilapidated refinery for cracking crude into gasoline. "Rationalization" of the energy market in Iran is long overdue, true, but now acquiring new, modern refinery capacity flies directly into the teeth of the slow, steady tightening of sanctioned technologies from going to the theofascist government in Iran.

If 'rationalization' of the energy sector in Iran is a goal of the theofascist government, then the gasoline situation is going to get much worse in Iran before it gets any better. The Swedish think tank, Captus, wrote a long study published by the National Science Foundation last December; the Iranian oil infrastructure has been so long neglected behind current technologies that Iran will be unable to continue exporting oil by 2012. If there are Iranian mobs today, imagine them in 2012.

Perhaps the revered mullahs have an economics education, to solve the coming Iranian energy crisis?

[Don Cox]

This neglect of the infrastructure is just the same as happened under Saddam in Iraq. A dominant, one-party government has no incentive to do its job properly.

The point of democracy is that incompetent governments are called to account by the citizens, and can lose their jobs.