Truckers formed a convoy of large trucks and crepted through Vancouver on friday to protest high fuel prices, as well as low wages and unsafe working conditions. A sign of things to come?

Hundreds of big trucks clogged major commuter routes this morning as truckers protested the high price of fuel, unsafe trucks and low wages.

Record levels of fuel prices are crippling many independent truckers, with up to one-third facing bankruptcy.

Some unionized truckers have fuel surcharges built into their shipping contracts but others have no protection.

The truckers are taking action to persuade the federal and provincial governments to lower fuel taxes to relieve pressure on the industry.

However, with the price of oil unlikely to come down any time soon, such moves might only serve as stopgap measures.

In fact, some oil industry watchers are predicting sharp increases in the price of oil to abover $100 per barrel as exponential industrial growth in China and India sharply increase worldwide demand for oil. Moreover, with many analysts predicting the imminent approach of peak oil - the point at which half of the world's reserves are depleted (see for example www.odac-info.org) - the price of oil could reach truly stratospheric levels.

With so much of the globalized capitalist economy dependent on long transportation chains, such a situation would force companies and nations the world over to seriously confront our addiction to oil.

At the very least, some of the comparative advantages enjoyed by countries in the industrializing global south (e.g. cheap labour, weak regulation, low tax regimes, etc.) would be lost encouraging some production to relocate to the hyper-industrialized global north.

On the more extreme side, it could also end consumer life as we know it, enforcing an end to consumption for consumption's sake due to rapid inflation in the cost of goods and raw materials, and in the end compel localized production.

This in turn would weaken a crucial mechanism by which transnational capital, especially in its financial aspect, enforces discipline on countries the world over - the threat of flight to more compliant territories.

Of course, the future of world-wide energy production is murky and complicated by numerous factors. But the truckers and their creeping convoy could be one of many convulsions suffered by the doomed canaries in the coal mine of the oil age.

Frank Zappatista