Petrol Price - 1st April
Comments
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AidanR wrote:I think simonaspinall's first couple of posts were unnecessarily provocative, but he's hardly a troll. He probably expected to find people whose initial reaction was the same as his - I don't think he came here to sh!t-stir. Asking him for answers to all of this, and then crucifying him when he unsurprisingly can't deliver solutions to what is going to become one of the biggest problems of our lifetimes is hardly fair.
The fact is he raises some good points. Like it or not, oil supplies are dwindling. How fast production rates will decline, I do not know. Not even the experts agree. But it will happen. Demand from rapidly developing countries like China will also factor in to the equation. Inevitable prices will rise, whether we like it or not; whether it's fair or not. Yes, the government takes a lot of tax, but the simple fact is crude oil prices are around 4 times what they were 10 years ago and fluctuations aside, the long term trend is only going to be up.
We've built our economy and our way of life around the car, and that is going to have to change, at least to an extent. Like any change it won't be easy and there will be many losers. People will have to get jobs closed to them, some people who drive for a living will lose their jobs. People will have to retrain. The poor will lose mobility. It's gonna suck, and it's going to require a wholesale change in expectations and attitudes. It's not anyone's fault in particular; it's the system we have collectively built. One day we will look back and wonder how and why we ever lived with such wasteful excess.
+1 (clap, clap, clap!)0 -
Rick Chasey wrote:As for the tax - it's pretty simple. The gov't feels .. that people use oil more than they should, since it is a big pollutant, and, if you're not a climate change denier, that it is a significant contribution to excessive C02 levels.
I don't think the National Government really give stuff about CO2 (or smokers etc) otherwise they would raise the price of petrol so much that people would stop driving and have to find an alternative "more green" (cheaper) form of transport.
As mentioned earlier in the thread a 5p per litre rise will add a maximum of £5 to a tank of petrol but as you will be paying £120 for that full tank anyway, will that extra £5 be stopping people from driving and so reduce emissions? Probably not.
Is it about raising an extra billion for the Treasury under the cover of it being a 'green policy'. More than likely.
I'm not a climate change denier either, I wish the government took it more seriously but increasing the price of a polluting commodity by 2.5% and saying it is part of their green travel policy is really just trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes.0 -
Rick Chasey wrote:As for the tax - it's pretty simple. The gov't feels, probably rightly, that people use oil more than they should, since it is a big pollutant, and, if you're not a climate change denier, that it is a significant contribution to excessive C02 levels.
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It's a big pollutant regardless of climate change - just look at smog over London through the summer months.0 -
tarquin_foxglove wrote:Rick Chasey wrote:As for the tax - it's pretty simple. The gov't feels .. that people use oil more than they should, since it is a big pollutant, and, if you're not a climate change denier, that it is a significant contribution to excessive C02 levels.
I don't think the National Government really give stuff about CO2 (or smokers etc) otherwise they would raise the price of petrol so much that people would stop driving and have to find an alternative "more green" (cheaper) form of transport.
As mentioned earlier in the thread a 5p per litre rise will add a maximum of £5 to a tank of petrol but as you will be paying £120 for that full tank anyway, will that extra £5 be stopping people from driving and so reduce emissions? Probably not.
Is it about raising an extra billion for the Treasury under the cover of it being a 'green policy'. More than likely.
I'm not a climate change denier either, I wish the government took it more seriously but increasing the price of a polluting commodity by 2.5% and saying it is part of their green travel policy is really just trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes.
You know that's not a political sell. No party other than the green party could put that forward and it's not for nothing a green party is a minority.
A little is better than nothing.
It's not about giving the treasury an extra billion. There are better, more popular ways of raising that kind of money, and they wouldn't have stagflationary side effects either.0 -
tarquin_foxglove wrote:I'm not a climate change denier either, I wish the government took it more seriously but increasing the price of a polluting commodity by 2.5% and saying it is part of their green travel policy is really just trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes.
You've got to look at the context. Ever since 1993 when the Conservative government introduced the Fuel Price Escalator it has been policy to increase fuel duty. In 1993 duty was around 33p per litre; it is now 56.2p and due to go up to 58.7p. On top of this is VAT, which is paid both on the raw price of the petrol and the duty. Yes, this is over 17 years but it's still well above (general) inflation.
The interesting thing, though, is that it is actually below "oil inflation". Fuel tax as a percentage of fuel costs is less than it was in 1993. Then it was 72.8%, rising to 81.9% in 1998 due to the continuing tax escalation and falling crude oil prices. Now, due to higher oil prices, it is 65.9% based on a fuel price of 116p (as quoted as an average figure in the latest news articles). Because fuel duty is priced per litre rather than as a percentage of the raw cost of petrol, it acts as a dampener to changing costs. Somewhere with very low tax on petrol, such as the US, has actually seen a greater increase in fuel costs (in percentage terms) than we have.
I'm not really sure what my point is any more, but it's all quite interesting.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/news/vote2001/hi/ ... 180919.stm
http://www.petrolprices.com/fuel-tax.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_Price_Escalator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#United_KingdomBike lover and part-time cyclist.0 -
I'm not really sure what my point is any more, but it's all quite interesting.
That life is better on a bike?
What wheels...? Wheelsmith.co.uk!0 -
I saw this professor from Liverpool University talking a while back - they have a unit set up there to study and advise on the rising price and scarcity of fossil fuels. They seem to be making quite a lot of money advising companies how to save money by becoming as fossil fuel independent as possible - good to see that good old common sense economic necessity is achieving more than our politicians ever could on climate change. Anyway - the upshot was that he believed there was a serious risk of oil price rises which he saw as inevitiable due to increased demand from - ironically, the recession ending - kicking us back into another recession - and so on. He believed that the price of oil was still seriously undervalued - and seemed to have lots of graphs and that to show he knew what he was tlaking about. It was very interesting.0
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Porgy,
If you are interested in discussions about Peak Oil then you should have a look at the website www.theoildrum.com
Some of it is quite doomerish, but a lot of it really makes sense to me.
Adam0 -
This is one of the most interesting debates I have seen here, or anywhere for that matter!
I fully agree with what AidanR's pionts.
I would add: people have been pushed out of cities - soometimes the cities where they were born and raised - due to the greed that pushed up property prices. It got way too expensive to l ive in London, for example, but you can't quit your job in London b/c it pays that mortgage that you just got to buy that 3 bedroom house outside the city. So what do you do? You either take a packed train into work or drive your car. When you are put a gun to your head like that, you don't really have that many choices, do you? And I'm fed up of the word "choice". We don't really have that many.
There is also the fact that the govt knows that it doesn't matter how much they raise the price of gasoline/petrol/whatever, people won't stop driving. Those who need it will be hurt the most, and that's unfair. They should actually get a tax break, I agree with Simon on that. But those who don't really need to drive that much, they will keep the car, because the TV tells them constantly, every day, that they must have a car. And all govt's bank on this.
We will find other sources of energy. These days oil means war, simple as that. We will run out of countries to invade, other people's land to grab, natural reserves to destroy, and there won't be much that the greedy oil companies can do about it. Cars will run on those alternative resources.
Mobility\hyper-mobility: we humans always travelled, even way before any engine was invented. Engines make it easier, that's all.0 -
Ho hum wrote:Porgy,
If you are interested in discussions about Peak Oil then you should have a look at the website www.theoildrum.com
Some of it is quite doomerish, but a lot of it really makes sense to me.
Adam
oh, ta
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Porgy wrote:Ho hum wrote:Porgy,
If you are interested in discussions about Peak Oil then you should have a look at the website www.theoildrum.com
Some of it is quite doomerish, but a lot of it really makes sense to me.
Adam
oh, ta
This is quite a good "index" of various articles on there as well:
http://www.postpeakliving.com/blog/aang ... drum-index
I must admit I found some of it quite fascinating, but also quite scary, lol!0 -
Just going to go back to filling my old Mercedes diesel with sunflower oil again now the weather is a tad warmer........................only 80p a litre from Asda Runs great on it and smells like chips!
Stevie.0
