Petrol Boycott

[EricL]

Recieved this email this morning.

Some places in Glasgow are selling it at £1.14.

It is getting ridiculous. Especially when you factor in the enormous profits the oil companies are making at our expense.

"See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it

We are hitting £106.9 a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with
paying £1.10 a litre. Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

This new idea makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the 'don't buy petrol on a certain day'
campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just
laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to hurt ourselves by
refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a
problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan
that can really work.

Please read it and join in!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think
that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to
teach them that BUYERS control the market place not sellers. With the price
of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only
way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone
in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT
hurting ourselves. Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year DON'T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil
companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their
prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow
suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and
BP petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!!

Now, don't wimp out on me at this point... keep reading and I'll explain how
simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it to at
least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at least ten more
(300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth
generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If
those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then
30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further,
you guessed it... ..

THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all.(and not buy
at ESSO/BP) How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out
to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could
conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! Acting together we can
make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE 69p a LITRE RANGE

It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol
at Shell, Asda,Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons Jet etc., i.e., boycott BP and
Esso"

we urgently need to stop using cars. We are really screwing up the environment for our kids

I don't know what the solution is if you live in a rural area. Much as I'd like to, especially to have a goodlifey smallholding, I don't live in a rural area because I would be uncomfortable with my petrol consumption if I did.

I accept that not everyone can live in towns.

There are good reasons to boycott Shell. The fact that they are huge enough to legally murder people who disagree with them is enough, really. But not higher petrol prices. Petrol prices should be through the roof, IMO. Certainly they should reflect the cost of cleaning up the planet (in practical terms, oil companies should being taxed through the roof)

people without cars usually manage byb getting lifts from people with cars

or they miss out on things because they have no transport

unless you live in a city with good transport

I do think that there is a real problem with poor public transport in this country.

It is expensive and often doesn't go anywhere helpful unless you work. It is not set up for the community really, except people commuting to and from the city centre. At least that is the case round here

London seems to have a great network, but it is so stupidly expensive. OTOH my family live in London and none of them have cars, though they can drive.

The solution is to do something about the public transport though, and also cycle lanes, not whinge about the price of petrol.

I suppose my diasbled dad should stay at home all day then as my mum and him clearly don't need a car to get around

I suppose I should stay in all the time as well, I have a bad knee that prevents me walking for long and some days is a lot worse than others, I struggle with the stairs at times (lots of pain and it gives way) but never know when a bad day will come.

Dd wouldn't get to school, ds1 wouldn't get to preschool, ds2 would hardly ever go out. We have bikes but ds1 can't pedal and I can't always pedal due to knee problems and also back problems since having ds2.

No real transport links between here and where dh works either. Maybe we should all just stay at home instead

I am intrigued by where EricL thinks that Sainbury's, Tesco etc get their petrol from.

we moved here from London so our children would have a better quality of life and a better education. I don't regret that for one second.

I dunno, I do think that we should all live in big cities really, from an environmental standpoint.

I do think that people with disabilities are among the very few who have a right to cars though

jesus we are spoilt in this country though. If the whole world used cars as we did, we would have been utterly screwed by now.

I think where you choose to live should be a personal decision

bit petrol should be so expensive that living in big cities, or at least close to public transport, becomes the desirable option.

again excepting people with disabilies yada yada. though public transport needs to be much more accesible to them.

Hmm, £10 to get a taxi to go 3 miles here, then a train trip to get anywhere near a supermarket so lets say £30 to go shopping, fab would love that plus also the £50 a week to get my children to school.

we moved here from London so our children would have a better quality of life and a better education. I don't regret that for one second.

Oops pressed send again by mistake 15 mins later lol

The supermarkets get their petrol from the big boys as well. I know that. I used to work in the supermarkets.

i think the whole point of this boycott is to bring the prices down and to make the oil companies realise they shouldn't be making billions of pounds of profit through continuously putting their prices up.

All of the big guns charge more-or-less the same. When i was responsible for a petrol station, part of the mornings ritual was to send off a price report of the pump prices of the surrounding competition. Any changes, up or down, would be matched exactly.

If one of the big boys puts down their prices because of lost sales - the rest will follow like a pack of sheep.

FACT.

The can all afford to do it. They just don't want to.

But surely the point is that the government fails again and again to actually DO anything that might improve matters or help people to stop using their cars? The only solution the government seems to know is tax. Too much car use? Tax petrol more! Too much airline use? Tax tax tax!

At what point will they actually start improving the transport networks, properly looking into renewable fuels, pressuring manufacturers to reduce packaging instead of placing all the blame at the consumers feet?

They won't, because all this shit makes them money! They won't do anything that will actually work because it won't bring money into the coffers.

Public transport is shit.

I spent many years using it every single day, using buses and trains to cross the city.

It takes too long, didn't start early enough for me and i kept falling asleep and missing my stop.

Coming home from a backshift was a lottery. You have to put up with all the knuckle-draggers who are out to cause as much noise and damage as possible.

I had to decide when to step in and when i thought that getting home safely to my family was more of a priority.

i only had to take action twice. Once was when a guy was hassling a lone woman and i physically pushed him off the train at the next stop, and once was when two guys were assaulting the guard.

Risking my own personal safety or letting a gang of louts terrorise a carriage, or having to avoid puddles of vomit or urine is not the kind of thing i like to contemplate after a hard days work.

I had enough and started to take the car. I was on time for work all of the time, could leave the house later and get back earlier - and it was a much more relaxing encounter not having to contend with idiots.

I realise that in some places travelling by car is not an option and public transport is the better way - but for me it just didn't work out.

over 60 % of the cost of petrol is tax/duty. The retailers make 5p a litre gross, 3p of which goes on costs

see chart here

similar chart from the bbc from 2005

The cost of petrol will NEVER go down to 69p a litre unless the tax is cut - the oil cos/retailers do not make enough money between them to fund that big a drop on a pence per litre basis

Iota

That's what i was saying last night.

Ericl

BP and the other oil companies make thier profits from exploration and producing products not from selling petrol/deisel.

On another note people in bedford can no longer go out of an evening unless they have a car because the local bus company are cutting out 9 late bus routes.

Excellent post, LazyLinePainterJane, Thu 10-Apr-08 16:07:47.

Believe it or not, using public transport in many areas is more expensive than using car, especially a car that you own outright.

And that's where it exists at all.

Lizziemun - some people just aren't listening are they?

So EricL you are asking us to avoid BP and Esso branded petrol...but we can still buy their petrol at the supermarket

By EricL on Thu 10-Apr-08 15:31:10
"Oil giant BP has reported a 26% rise in annual profit to $16.2bn (£8.7bn) after benefiting from high oil prices.
Last week, rival Shell reported an annual profit of $17.5bn - a record profit for a UK-listed company."

that quote is from 2005

here's some more recent info from Feb 2008:

"BP reported a sharp drop in profits this morning and revealed that 5,000 jobs will be cut by next summer.The energy giant made a profit of $2.97bn (£1.5bn) in the fourth quarter of last year, 24% down on a year ago,"

from www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/05/bp.oil2

here's Shell for 2007

Shell sets new UK profits record The Anglo-Dutch oil firm Royal Dutch Shell has reported annual profits of $27.56bn (£13.9bn), a record for a UK-listed company.

from

Too right, expat. We have a decent amount of public transport here, but the costs are mad! (And I am sure that my predicament is nothing compared to the nightmare you face!)

It's all well and good to spout sound bites about people giving up their cars, but there needs to be a viable alternative! A clean, affordable and actually maintained system would be a start. So many other countries manage it, why can't we?

I just get so sick of all the blame being laid at our feet, when there is nothing being done at the other end. There seems to be feature after feature about plastic usage, carrier bags, making people recycle more but NOTHING to solve the problem instead of tackling the results of said problem.

For instance, why the arse are manufacturers still allowed to overpackage everything so massively? Why are supermarkets not simply banned from using carrier bags? That would solve one of the problems straight away.

tsk!

here's Exxonmobil:

Thanks to surging oil prices, the company beat its own record for the highest profit ever recorded by a U.S. company, with net income rising 3 percent to $40.6 billion last year. The company's sales - over $404 billion - exceeded the gross domestic product of all but the 24 richest countries in the world.

from www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/01/business/exxon.php