Top Ten Reasons Why Oil-to-Cash Won’t Work (And Rebuttals!)

This is a joint post with Stephanie Majerowicz.

When we share the Oil-to-Cash idea with people who are hearing about it for the very first time, the typical response is almost always viscerally negative. (If you aren’t familiar with Oil-to-Cash, here’s the web page and a 4-min jellybeans video.)  They usually say “That won’t work because of X” or “Sure, that works in Alaska, but my country Y is very different” or “No, the money would be much better spent on Z”.  Often, by the second or third time we talk with people about citizen dividends, however, they start to come around. In a few cases, we’ve even had former skeptics pitching us ideas of how it could work better.

But what’s been remarkable is how often we run up against a very similar set of objections. Here are the Top Ten Reasons Oil-to-Cash Won’t Work:

1. We need infrastructure
2. We need social services
3. We need subsidies for food and fuel
4. We should be like Norway and save it
5. We don’t want inflation
6. Cash will only encourage laziness
7. Cash will fuel consumption rather than investment
8. Dividends won’t help our poor governance
9. We have no national identification and few people have bank accounts
10. No politician will ever give up control of oil money

Here is our response.