A strike over vanishing pensions brought upon by massive corporate debt has shut down most of the North Sea oil pipeline.
This a symptom of the Anglo Disease, ie the wholesale domination of our economies by reckless financial capitalism:
On commodity prices soaring
Rapid market movement in a tightly coupled global economic system can suck a country dry of a commodity (the typical mechanism is push, this is pull). No resource wars (which is a foolish concept), just market-induced disruption.
Much of the current run up in commodity prices is fueled by speculation and by gaming the system. That the poor of the world suffer even more because of this is irrelevant to them.