Iran: High-octane politics

If Iran’s leaders were really so dictatorial, they would have the courage to cut the country’s absurd petrol subsidies

The first taste of Iran is almost always the petrol fumes from the capital’s near permanent traffic jams. Tehran is a city of about eight million people – 14 million if you count the outer suburbs – and they seem to spend much of their time in cars.

And why not? Petrol here is subsidised and costs about 6p a litre. There is consequently huge demand, but limited supply. With that price at the pumps, it has not made economic sense to build refineries, so Iran has managed to become an oil-rich nation with chronic petrol shortages.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad introduced rationing last year, limiting drivers to a draconian 120 litres a month – four litres a day – but it does not seem to have made much of a difference to the Tehran traffic. It still takes an hour or so to get across the city centre. Apparently people have found ways of getting around the ration cards, trading them and paying bribes at the pump. For Norouz, the Persian new year holiday, which begins next week, Ahmadinejad has relaxed the system, allowing drivers to get extra petrol at a price closer to market value, so that they can get their families to their home village or to the resorts along the Caspian coast.

The whole system is daft, and not just from the point of view of global warming. Iran is blowing its oil profits on petrol subsidies, so that people end up spending hours a day in traffic jams. There are a few nods in the direction of public transport. On some of the wider boulevards, there is a fast lane in the centre for special high-speed buses, but there are clearly not enough buses. Each one is crammed to bursting.

At this rate, Iran will burn through its oil wealth in a generation, ultimately justifying all the effort it is putting into nuclear development. The inverse of that argument is that if the country did not waste so much fuel, it would not have to worry so much about its future energy needs and their would be less urgency, and less tension, surrounding its nuclear programme.

Guardian