An unusual road accident put traffic to a complete halt today on the E6 highway outside Strömstad on the Swedish west coast.

A truck loaded with sill herring offal dropped its smelly cargo after a tailgate had opened up as the truck passed over a speed bump. The fish offal flew out of the truck and into the grill of a passing truck, causing a complete engine failure.

No one was injured, says SOS Alarm, the Swedish Emergency Service, but the Swedish road administration expects the clean-up work to take several hours.

Herring
Herring is a fairly small oily fish native to shallow parts of the North Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, including the Baltic Sea. Herring has been an important part of Swedish cuisine for thousands of years and the fish is still served year round. Herring becomes especially sough after around Christmas and Midsummer when it is served in its traditional pickled fashion and chased down with hard liquor made from grain or potatoes. Herring caught in the Baltic Sea can also be fermented for 6 to 12 months to produce surströmming. Several airlines have banned canned of surströmming on their flights, deeming the pressurized containers a safety hazard.

An attempt to look at the bright side. The media writes a lot about all the problems the high oil price causes. The problems it causes in house hold budgets, how it affects the US trade deficit and how it drives inflation but we don’t take the time to see the positive effects associated with a higher oil price. You might not think the benefits are large enough to offset the drawbacks and you might be right but it can none the less be good to be aware of the benefits. Below I will list a few of the benefits but there are many more.

Reduced oil consumption

The increased oil price means that people drive less which reduces the carbon dioxide emissions. It might feel like an inconvenient to walk to the movies instead of taking the car or otherwise change ones travel habitats but it do help the environment. Even if we look beyond our personal driving habits we can see that high oil prices can have more far reaching benefits as it creates an incentive for car manufacturers to make more fuel effective car as a mean to compete in the market. It can also change the buying pattern towards not buying bigger cars than we actually need. The high energy price can also affect our consumption in other areas such as air tickets. Hopefully some of these changes will stick even after the oil price has return to more acceptable levels.

Alternative energy sources

Higher oil prices makes new greener energy sources more economic viable. Some green energy sources become more compatible and are economically competitive when energy and oil prices rise. Higher oil and energy prices also create more incentive for companies to develop and refine green technologies and energy sources as there is a potentially larger, more lucrative market available to sell these products on. One green energy source that becomes more viable with the higher energy price is algae oil. Algae can be used to produce high quality oil that can be used to produce gasoline and even jet fuel. Algae is much more productive than other crops and one acre used for algae farming can produce several hundred times more oil than other crops used to produce green fuel such s corn. A few algae oil plants are being built this year but the technology is still to be considered experimental. I will post more info on algae oil in a separate article later this week if you want to know more about it. Algae oil is just one example on green energies that becomes more viable when oil prices are higher.

Unfortunately high oil prices also increase the pressure to explore oil resources in sensitive are such as in Alaska and of the Florida coast.

Some fish species get a much needed break

The high oil prices can give a much needed breather for some fish species as fishermen no longer find it economically viable to fish these species or in certain areas. An example of one fish that might end up benefiting from the high oil price is the idiotfish. The idiotfish is a deep sea fish living of the coast of British Columbia and is an appreciated food item in parts of Asia. It was listed as a species of special concern last year by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. The high oil prices have resulted in large parts of the deep sea fishing fleet in British Columbia’ staying in port or fishing in shallower water closer to land. This gives the idiotfish population a much needed chance to rebound. Other fish are in a similar situation and might benefit from the high oil prices.

This was just a few of the benefits of higher oil prices.

Nothing you have read will make it less painful to pay the current gas prices but it can still be nice to know that this misery have a silver lining.

European Union

In December 2007, the EU commission presented their suggestion for a new law that would force car manufacturers to decrease the average carbon dioxide emissions from new cars down to 130 grams per kilometre by 2012. This draft does however come with one gigantic loop hole – the new law would only target cars weighing less than 2,610 kg (5,754 lbs). This could actually prompt car manufacturers to start building even heavier cars than today, just to avoid the new law. Another possible escape route is to make slight alterations to the cars in order to make it possible for them to be registered as light trucks. When a similar law was put into action in the United States during the 1970s, car manufacturers immediately responded by producing large quantities of SUVs that could evade the law by registering as work vehicles. The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC) is now urging the EU parliament and the national governments to take action and remove these loop wholes from the final draft of the law.