[AshtonEndal]

I just got this from me Madre and figured it's worth a shot. I usualy buy from a Mobil so I guess I can move on to someone else, so long as it dosn't cost TOO much. Pass this on, I'm gonna' post on a few message baords to get it across.


> GAS WAR - an idea that WILL work
>
> This was originally sent by a retired Coca Cola
> executive. It came from one of
> his engineer buddies who retired from
> Halliburton. It ' s worth your
> consideration.
>
> Join the resistance!!!! I hear we are going to
> hit close to $4.00 a gallon by
> next summer and it might go higher!! Want
> gasoline prices to come down? We need
> to take some intelligent, united action. Phillip
> Hollsworth offered this good
> idea.
>
> This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the "don't buy
> gas 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
> gas. 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 on and join with us! By now you're
> probably thinking gasoline priced
> at about $1.50 is super cheap. Me too! It is
> currently $2.79 for regular
> unleaded in my town. Now that the oil companies
> and the OPEC nations have
> conditioned us to think that the cost of a
> gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 -
> $1.75, we need to take aggressive action to
> teach them that BUYERS control the
> marketplace..... not sellers. With the price of
> gasoline going up more each day,
> we consumers need to take action. The only way
> we are going to see the price of
> gas come down is if we hit someone in the
> pocketbook by not purchasing their
> gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting
> ourselves. How? Since we all rely on
> our cars, we can't just stop buying gas. But we
> CAN have an impact on gas prices
> if we all act together to force a price war.
>
> Here's the idea:
>
> For the rest of this year, DON' T purchase ANY
> gasoline from the two biggest
> companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL.
> If! they are not selling any
> gas, 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 Exxon and Mobil
> gas buyers. It's really simple to do! Now, don't
> wimp out at this point....
> keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is
> to reach millions of people.
>
> I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of
> us sends it to at least ten more
> (30 x 10 =3D 300) ... and those 300 send it to
> at least ten more (300 x 10 =3D
> 3,000)...and so on, by the time the message
> reaches the sixth group 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. (If you don't
> understand how we can reach 300 million and all
> you have to do is send this to
> 10 people.... Well, let's face it, you just
> aren't a mathematician. But I am, so
> trust me on this one.)
>
> How long would all that take? If each of us
> sends this e-mail out to ten more
> people within one day of receipt, all 300
> MILLION people could conceivably be
> contacted within the next 8 days!!!!
>
> I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that
> much potential, did you?
>
> Acting together we can make a difference. If
> this makes sense to you, please
> pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy
> from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY
> LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $1.30 RANGE AND KEEP
> THEM DOWN.
>
> THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

[tehScarecrow]

[WarHound]

*looks around* Only Valero pumps in my town. Guess I'm in the free?

Doesn't really sound feasible to me, but luck with it.

-WP

[HaiWolfe]

Unfortunately, this won't work.

[the_logos]

Americans are spoiled. Gas is still cheap here compared to, say, Europe, though that's the result of large taxes in Europe. What's the result? Europeans drive much more responsible cars, generally, than Americans do.

The fact is, Americans have no 'right' to cheap oil. Sheesh, even at current prices, it's often cheaper than milk! Long-term, you can expect to see oil prices continue to rise, because the fact is that oil is a limited resource that IS going to run out. If Americans won't learn to moderate their energy consumption voluntarily, the market will make them do it by driving up oil prices until demand slacks off some.

The problem isn't Exxon. It's the average American consumer: addicted to oil and believing that cheap and easy access to it is their god-given right. And it's the average American who is contributing to the disaster that is global warming. Global warming = people dying and entire countries (like Tuvalu) being destroyed by rising waters. Reducing America's energy consumption is not just a practical matter when framed like this - it's a moral imperative.

So all I have to say is: Three cheers for rising oil prices. It's about time.

--matt

[Shane]

[Valg]

Kerry Emanuel wrote an article published in Nature documenting how the overall intensity, frequency, and duration of hurricances has steadily increased over the last 30 years, over and above expected cycles and fluctuations.  Briefly, hurricanes now dump more than twice as much energy onto land per year, with a 50% increase in average peak wind speed and a 60% increase in cumulative storm duration.  The author writes:
The article was published in August, 2005.  Remember any news stories from September 2005 related to hurricanes?

Saying that you'll move somewhere 20 feet above sea level because sea level is only expected to rise inches per year is a bit short-sighted.

If you're interested in reading the scientific community's nail-in-the-coffin to the belief that global warming is fictional, check out this .  It's the result of a review of 928 peer-reviewed scientific publications dealing with climate change, and summarizes how every major scientific organization studying climate change agrees on the fact that global warming is both real and the result of human activity.

[Dovolente]

Too true!

Oil companies are the innocent victims in all of this. Forget how they dominate energy issues in Washington, and how their advertising campaigns and various business influences reinforce the American lifestyle of oil dependance.

It's those greedy, stupid American consumers who deserve our scorn.

[Ilkidarios]

Sawyer Gas powers my house, other than that I don't use a lot of gasoline.  I've never been able to afford a car, but I don't think I'm missing much.

Me, I've always thought global warming was some kind of hoax. Earth has been changing by itself for millions of years, but these scientists are just cooking up some kind of weird theories in an effort to get more research funding.

Of course, I don't trust a whole lot of researchers and what-not, so I have a personal bias.

[Valg]

Of course, one would be more likely to get research funding if they published data showing that global warming was fictional, because publishing yet another article confirming the accepted consensus isn't going to raise any eyebrows. (Can you name the second guy to publish a paper on relativity? The guy who developed the second polio vaccine?) The scientific process encourages maverick theories much more than it suppresses them.

Add in the fact that companies which depend on fossil fuels would looooove to provide research grants to scientific organizations which supported their agenda. The problem is, you need data, and no one seems to be able to come up with any data which can withstand the review process that says anything except "global warming is real and caused by humans", which is why every major scientific organization is in consensus on this topic.

[the_logos]

It's not about trite, black & white "good" and "evil" guys. It's not about who is the bad guy, as that's just a label. It's about identifying the real problems and creating policy or taking action to reduce or eliminate them.

There's really no debating the existence of global warming at this point. Its existence is not significantly under discussion in the responsible scientific community anymore. Sure, the Bush administration can trot out 'experts', but this is the same administration who recently tried to claim that under Bush, America's wetlands have made a comeback....only to be pressed on the issue and be forced to admit that by 'wetlands' they literally mean water hazards on golf courses and sewage reprocessing fields. (Also the administration that wants to triple the allowed arsenic in rural water supplies because it's cheaper than cleaning up the water.)

Given that we -are- doing long-term damage, the analogy to dictating how France runs its economy is not apt. I live just north of San Francisco. I'd be pretty ticked off if something France was doing was increasing the chances that the Bay Area will get hit by a bad earthquake.

As regards the oil companies, I have lots of issues with them (mainly in the areas of environmentalism and human rights...they can be real bastards to locals in third world countries), but I don't see how we can begrudge them making their profits. It's not our oil. We don't have some right to it and to act as if we do, especially when most of it comes from foreign countries, is just the kind of attitude that makes so many people in the rest of the world hate America. If you don't like the price or can't afford it, modify your lifestyle. If you're not willing to modify your lifestyle, suck it up and pay. Anyway, fundamentally, gas prices track oil prices, and the oil companies don't have much say in what they pay for crude.

And finally, I'll give you a nice, selfish reason why we should all celebrate the inevitable rise in oil (and thus gasoline) prices: As oil prices rise, other energy alternatives become increasingly economically viable. High oil prices = increased research by energy companies, governments, and other companies into non-oil energy sources. The faster the world can end its dependence on oil, the better off we will all be. There are very real economic consequences for -everybody- of $200/barrel oil with no practical alternative, and simply awful consequences for the poor of the world (drastically increased starvation, for instance, since fertilizers will become too expensive for them to use, cutting food development significantly).

Yes, it sucks shelling out at the pump. But let's not forget that our big cars and energy-wasting lifestyles have a price for the rest of the world. Americans (I am one of them) are addicted to oil, and we (including me) have shown an inability or unwillingness to reform our behavior out of compassion or simple moderation. Think of high oil prices as an intervention to help us break the disease that is our addiction.

--matt

[Shane]

Something that has also been proven beyond much debate is we were due for a heavier series of years of hurricanes due to natural phenomenon.

I don't doubt global warming. I do doubt modern sciences ability to gauge how much of it is natural and how much is related to man, but the bottom line is polution is polution and should be minimized. What I don't like is scare tactics. I also fail to understand how moral relativism even plays into this. People being tortured and killed and their bodies parted out for profit should not somehow be ignored in favor of trying to bring down oil companies who are basically guilty of buying and selling things.

This sort of thing is I believe precisely why the issue of global warming doesn't get the attention it deserves. It is almost always attached to a group of people whose values are so outside the comprehensible norm that it seems that no rational way forward will suffice. Things will be done as they have always been done, in increments, which priorities set in line with percieved importance.

That's just how life goes. I can't get myself that excited about it. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong but since I don't know any other people who are always right anyhow, I am willing to take a more moderated stance on the subject of global warming than I am on more immediate and obvious sorts of problems.

It's not as if Human Rights Watch is some sort of right wing operation or something.

[Valg]

You can't get an article into Nature without accounting for that sort of thing. (It's one of the most rigorously reviewed and widely-read scientific journals.) As I mentioned, the man-made impact is over and above the baseline (anything you would expect from existing cycles and predictions). Otherwise it wouldn't be worth printing.

[GuruPlayer]

This is a reprint of a posting by Arianna Huffington posted today on her website "The Huffington Post":

George Bush: Foreign Policy from God, Energy Policy from Big Oil  

The president may turn to God when it comes to shaping his foreign policy, but his energy policy is strictly courtesy of the Men Upstairs at Big Oil.

Which is why it is beyond comical to watch Moe, Curly, and Larry -- sorry, I mean Bush, Hastert, and Frist -- getting all blue in the face about skyrocketing gas prices, and calling on the Energy and Justice Departments to look into possible market manipulation by oil companies.

It’s the least believable call for an investigation since O.J. set out to find the real killers.

For those of you experiencing a sudden wave of déjà vu, yes, the GOP demand for a federal probe of potential oil industry price-gouging was a carbon copy of the demands Chuck Schumer made last week. Hey, maybe they just unconsciously “internalized” Schumer’s words.

If it wasn’t so despicable it would be laughable.

There was Frist on Good Morning America today, putting aside his video diagnostic skills to become one of the “Car Talk” guys. Among Frist’s helpful money saving tips for drivers forced to consider taking out a second mortgage in order to fill up their tanks: get a tuneup, drive slower, and carpool. Thanks, Dr. Goodwrench!

But Frist was just the gassy second banana. The clear headliner was Bush, who had them rolling in the aisles at a meeting of the Renewable Fuels Association, with zingers like his claim that “large cash flows” mean that “these energy companies don’t need unnecessary tax breaks”. A sentiment that didn’t stop the president from signing a GOP energy bill stuffed with some $14.5 billion in tax breaks, tax subsidies, and tax deductions for his cash-rich energy industry chums. I guess those tax breaks were “necessary.”

Bush also scored big with his impression of a guy who cares about conservation, highlighting the need to “promote greater fuel efficiency”: “And the easiest way to promote fuel efficiency,” said the president, “is to encourage drivers to purchase highly efficient hybrid or clean diesel vehicles.” As the proud owner of a pair of hybrids, I say “hear, hear.” As a sentient human being I say, "Isn't this the same guy whose administration hasn't increased fuel efficiency standards for passengers cars even a single m.p.g. in six years?” Maybe now that former GM-lobbyist (and fuel efficiency opponent) Andy Card has left the White House, Bush has finally allowed his inner-Prius owner to run free. Or maybe the lure of touting vehicles that can run on alternative energy sources to an alternative energy trade association was just too hard to resist.

How gullible do they think we are? Memo to the White House: it’s not working. Bush’s approval rating just dropped to 32% -- a number at which both water and political clout freeze.

All this huffing and puffing about manipulated markets and record gas prices scream of a blatant attempt to inoculate Republicans from consumer rage over the massive earnings oil companies are scheduled to announce this week. Industry analysts predict that ExxonMobil will report first-quarter earnings of only $9.1 billion on Thursday -- down from the record $10.7 billion posted in the fourth quarter of 2005. With profits like that, Lee Raymond’s $400 retirement package is starting to look a little stingy. Except to those paying through the nose at the pump.

The most honest comment on the gas price crisis came from Scott McClellan (freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, eh, Scottie?) who said: “This is not something we got into overnight.” Exactly. These levels of oil company profits took years of careful lobbying and planning to orchestrate.

Our oil-man president may want us to think that he’s shocked, shocked by the “large cash flows” of the oil companies, and the sticker shock drivers are experiencing at the pump, but even before Team Bush was dreaming of toppling Saddam, it was laying the groundwork for the gargantuan windfall the oil industry is seeing -- starting with Dick Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force.

It’s not a coincidence that the oil and gas industries donated over $25 million to Congressional campaigns in 2004 (with 80% of that money going into Republican coffers), and another $7.2 million so far in the 2006 cycle (with 84% going to the GOP). They also doled out over $4.5 million to Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential runs.

And what did they get for their largess? According to Public Citizen, the top five oil companies have pocketed over a quarter of trillion (that’s with a “T”) in profits since Bush took office. Talk about a return on investment. That’s a gusher!

So for American consumers, payback is a bitch. And three bucks a gallon at the gas pump. The Bush administration has turned the White House into a full service filling station for Big Oil. And we’re the ones being forced to pick up the tab.

So don’t let the empty rhetoric and the phony outrage pouring out of the White House and the Republican Congress fool you: America isn’t facing a shortage of fuel; it’s facing a shortage of leadership.

[Shane]

[Shane]

Guru,

All I can tell you is we in Texas would have really appreciated all this attention on the scandalous, years long plot to inflate oil profits in the 80's when everyone was going bankrupt in the industry.

Also, it is well known that a big part of the problem is we stopped building refineries somewhere in the 70's, so there is no way to increase supply. This has as much to do with environmental concerns as it does oil profiteering, but the bottom line is if you're only running a handful of refineries at peak capacity, supply goes down and profits go up. It's one of those things scientists don't debate much either.

So again, I am sorry but the bleak, evil-American-oil-barons-ought-to-be-strung-up sort of rhetoric is not reality. You slap some more restrictions on oil and you may well be looking at a Repeat of Carter's gas line phenomenon, where it simply ceases to be profitable to make and sell gas at all, so people just stop. If you wanted to be a good liberal on this issue, what you really might ought to be talking is, "why with record profits are oil industry workers not making more than they are?" That would get some folks' attention in a hurry.

These are important matters, I understand, but it is also important not to get so ramped up you are motivated to shoot people over what essentially, once again, is merely the buying and selling of things. Certainly, anyone who wants to go into the alternative energy source market and open a company is welcome to. The fact is, even at its present price range, gas and oil and so forth are still cheaper.

The new things are coming. Just have a little patience and a little faith in your fellow human being. I've been hearing this sort of thing all my life, and it appears it has been going on for all of recorded history. With the rare exception of ignoring the possibility that people who claim they intend to conquer the earth really mean to try to do that, there are very few instances in history where the world as we know it really does just suddenly cease to exist, though. That's more of a religious thing than a scientific thing.

[Threshold]

Uh... yes it is. In fact, the opposite of what you say is the case. There is very little responsible science that supports global warming. Furthermore, there is an enormous amount of scientific evidence that the sun is getting hotter. Any warming that we experience is far more likely to be the result of this fact about the sun.

The fact that I point that out does not mean I disagree with many of the other points. We should be using less gas/oil/fossil fuels. There's absolutely no excuse for our continued reliance upon it. I read a great article a few years ago and I keep it bookmarked:



Everything on the list is interesting, but for the purposes of this conversation:

I also remember vividly one night when I was watching the tv news show Hardball with Chris Matthews. He recounted a story I've heard him tell many times, how numerous automobile industry lobbyists have admitted (privately, and off the record) that if the government doubled the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy ) standard tomorrow, every car manufacturer could easily comply. They just don't have the motivation to do so, and the oil lobby prevents the government from doing it.

That's just sad.

I'm about 50/50 on the issue of drilling in ANWR, but the only way I'd ever support it is if in the exact same bill, CAFE standards were at least doubled. I have read that the ANWR region is the most oil rich property the US owns. That's a great resource. But lets not use it until we are ready to use it efficiently.

[Ilkidarios]

Who're we supposed to put in the White House that would be any different from Bush? All politicians are the same guy with a different face, Democrat or Republican, it's the same damn guy.

[Valg]

Not only are you completely and utterly wrong, an incredibly damning was given in this very thread.

I'm not sure what Fox News broadcast or Scott McClellan soundbite you got the opposite information from, unless you're claiming that the consensus of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, the IPCC (an international panel appointed by the UN to study peer-reviewed climatology articles), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science constitutes "very little responsible science".

Even the EPA, under an administration with no regard for environmental issues in the least, begins a of their report commissioned from the National Academy of Sciences with "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." That's the first sentence, but it gets worse from there. (This report is co-signed by the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council.)

Armchair climatologists (most often politicians, pundits, etc.) may distort the facts for their own agendas, but the message from the scientific community is loud and clear.

The "sun is getting hotter" theory was as early as 1997. Even worst-case models demonstrated it could at most explain 1/3 of the warming, and those models are intentionally generous in order to test if it's even possible that the sun could be causative.

I SciFindered up recent primary literature in major journals, and Science published an article in May 2005 (Wild, M et al.; 2005, Science 6 May 2005; 308: 847-850) illustrating that worldwide solar radiation levels have actually been dropping in recent decades, largely because our altered atmosphere scatters more light. (This is due to particulate pollutants like soot, rather than greenhouse gases.) The authors conclude that sunlight reaching the Earth's surface showed "a decline of 4% to 6% over 30 years", and warn that the phenomenon may have caused us to underestimate exactly how screwed we already are.

So don't blame the sun. It's our mess, and we should clean it up.

[Ilkidarios]

I wouldn't mind a little ice-cap melting myself, it may mean Florida would go underwater, but if it got rid of Miami we'd all be better off. I'd miss Clewiston, but I don't think anybody else would.

Plus, who's to say there are no positive benefits? What if there was a longer growing season? There's no real way to tell if this "global warming" thing would have positive or negative benefits for specific areas, at least, last time I checked. Of course, I haven't kept that up to date since the early 90's, I lost interest after fighting in the Gulf War.

I mean, maybe computer technology has advanced since the early 90's, but I don't think our computers can determine hypothetical global warming effects on specific areas yet.