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Interesting, albeit rather apocalyptic, article in the New Statesman a week ago regarding long term effects of oil shortage, high price etc, on our current western lifestyles. Not just a matter of having to cut back on Julia's clarinet lessons because the cost of running the 4 x 4 down to Waitrose to get some more Ciabatta has become prohibitive. Much of our suburban infrastructure has been constructed on the premise that oil will continue to be available cheaply and plentifully. Interetsingly, having hit $60 some weeks ago, oil has stayed at around this price, despite the Iraq situation not being markedly worse than it was 6 months ago, and it being summer in the northern hemisphere, a time of lower world oil demand. Wonder what the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia will do to the oil price today (threat, maybe remote, of fundamentalist/Taleban style take over there, followed likely if so by US occupation, rather disruptive to world's main oil producer). Or if there is a cold winter in EU / USA? Not to mention a different, political, sort of fundamentalism and harking back to the past emerging in Putin's Russia and maybe the 'stans' to the south, where we seem to be relying a lot for future energy needs. Of course the the scale for construction of suburbs, and their possible abandonment by the wealthy for more rural areas or inner city Docklands type developments, is in decades, thousands of times slower than daily fluctuations in the oil price. But if oil stays at around $60, or even goes higher, to $100 say, how sustainable will suburbs of European, and especially US, cities be? The rich will make the necessary adjustments soonest, leaving a large pool of poor who can least afford to be living in unsustainable suburban areas living precisely there. Maybe, given the parlous state of EU integration, as shown by recent Constitution debacle, we should leave the EU and apply to become 51st state of the USA, at least we'd likely be part of the last Western state to have a reasonable share of oil for its citizens then. Hillary Shaw, Geography, University of Southampton