price of fuel

[Bonefish]

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

We are hitting 99.9p a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced
with paying £1+ a ltr. Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:
This 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 whimp 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 MILLIONPEOPLE!!!
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 8days!!! 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.

[Batchoy]

The problem with this idea is that it assumes that OPEC and the oil companies are responsible for the high cost of fuel, when it is actually the government who are responsible, and they are the ones who are claiming that fuel is too cheap and the price must being increased to protect the environment. However as we found out during the last set of fuel protests the tax they take is not used to make transport and infrastructure improvements to lessen the impact of transport on the environment, but to fund other expenditure such as the NHS.

Not only do the government put on a huge amount of duty (50.53p per litre on low sulphar unleaded as of 1^st October when they increased duty by 2p/l, and are due to do it again on 1^st April next year), but they have the gaul to double tax us by making us pay VAT on the duty.

So for the 100.2p/l I am currently paying, 65.35p goes in tax and 34.75p goes to the retailer/haulier/oil company . Of the 34.75p roughly 6.5p is split between the retailer to make a living and the haulier to cover the delivery costs to get the fuel to the retailer, the remaining 28.25p is the ex-refinery price of the petrol. Any increase in this ex-refinary due to increased oil prices is magnified by government taxation to the tune of 17.5% because of VAT.

The goal of this campaign is also nigh impossible, at 69p/l if the retailer/haulier margin remained at 6.5p/l the ex-refinary price of petrol would have to drop to 1.7p/l a reduction of some 94%!.

Just as a footnote, todays spot price for crude at $94.85 per barrel equates to 29p/l.