Buying an oil well is better if Malta had the money

Europe has become a slave to the whims of Opec. Every single individual, given our complete dependence upon fossil fuel for quite some time, has become, indeed, powerless, living at the mercy of faceless men who must wield undreamt of international power.

Rather than buying penny packets of oil every so often, each consignment being subject to the winds of economic chance and policy, we should buy an oil well – if we had the money.

If it contained our required supply for about 100 years, we would draw our oil at a price which would restore our in-vestment over that period in a reasonably stable fashion, without the cataclysms we are experiencing, which destabilise the delicate financial mechanism of our small economy and cause such friction between leaders and led.

But I don’t think we have the money for that. By the way, that is what China does: China buys oil wells rather than oil. But then the Chinese are rich and were always a clever people.