OiL Focus II: 石油多面睇 II

After getting understand on the basic reasons for the high pricing of oil, some of you may immediately want to ask: What are the great effect of high oil price to our economy? And what's more important: the ways to minimize this problem.
Basically, the first way the high oil price affects us is the cost of transport. No matter you are living in US or UK, Hong Kong or Mainland China, Japan or Korea, you must find that your traffic cost become more expensive (except you are living in middle-east or other oil rich countries). Sometimes, when the oil company announced to raise the fuel (mainly petroleum and LPG) price by coming mid-night, you may even find a long line of vehicles waiting outside the oil stop for cheaper refills at that night. You can imagine how great effects the oil bring to the people's living! However, it's just the surface of the matter...
With increase of oil price, the cost of production of many manufacturing industries would increase. Since oil has multiple function, they can be used to make plastic,dyes..etc. The industries which makes plastic-related product would face a higher production cost. Even some industries do not make oil or plastic related product, they would also need to face the higher exportation cost when they export their products to other places. But the merchant are not fools,when they face higher cost, they would simply transfer the cost to the consumers. So, what's the result? Nearly all the things you want to buy become more expensive when you compare to the last two years. And that's the inflation!
Inflation caused by high oil price, would bring our economy to a undesirable situation, HIGH natural unemployment rate. It is because when the companies maintain constant nominal wage given to their worker, their workers are however facing higher price in their consumption, the real wage to them are decreasing. If the real wage continue to decrease, more and more of them would leave the job, higher unemployment rate results. If we assume the production factor of each labor is unchanged before and after the inflation--say, one labor can make one unit of product, the increase in natural level of unemployment would lead the same amount decrease of output. GDP would therefore go down.
Crude oil, the energy source that brings convenience to us, also brings trouble to our economy. Though the technology is improving, we cannot escape from using oil as out main energy source.To minimize its effect to us, the most possible ways are reduce and recycle. For reduce, we can simply take more public transports instead of driving our own cars. For recycle, people can take used bottle or plastic bag to recycle bin or recycle stop instead of throwing them on the streets or rubbish bin. Only through this way, can the demand of oil and thus its price become stable or even be decreased. Frankly, either reducing or recycling would bring us inconvenience. However, before the new energy like ethanol can be widely used, in order to minimize the oil effect, we should take care of the importance of conservation.