Oil companies make more money.

We are all pretty depressed at the cost of a tank of fuel. The rising cost of oil is not bad new for everyone. I note this morning that Shell have just posted obscene profits of 18.5 billion euros. With the global demand for oil increasing the price is set to climb even higher. Why though should a company that makes fuel which we all need be posting such high profit annoucements.

To my mind this smacks of a cartel. Competition is supposed to mean lower prices for the consumer but we see that this adage does not seem to apply to the fuel industries (this includes gas and electricity prices as well!)

The profits made come very much from the prices paid by you and I the average consumer. There are some things we can do to encourage more healthy competition in the energy/fuel market.

1) If we shopped around en-mass and boycotted a company it would be forced to lower its prices and then as we start buying from them again another oil company will also drop its prices.

2) We reduce demand for oil. If we agree to walk instead of take the car for every journey we can walk in 20 minutes, we reduce our demand for fuel. We will also be a lot healthier and reduce our cars running costs and maintenance by not using it for short journeys.

This 2 pronged approach requires we all synchronize our habits and mindset. We already have one thing in common - we do not like paying the current high fuel costs and we choke when we see the obscene profits made by the oil industry.

How though can we all shop around with the same buying parameters - here is an idea. Taking the letters that make up the company name we could boycot them if the letters of the current month contain the same letter? Strangely enough it works out that we boycott the main oil companies for 2 months in a row.

Green Motoring is this the answer to climate change?

Much hype exists in the media about green motoring. There is more of an agreement on the reality of climate change nowadays as people are becoming concerned at the changing weather patterns. A new multi million $ industry of Green living has sprung up from governments introducing new Green taxes to reduce emissions of CO2 to car companies releasing fuel sipping varients of their popular engines.

Bio fuels are hailed as the solution. Bio fuel is a fuel source which is grown instead of being drilled or extracted from our earths limited resources. Oils can be extracted from crops and made into a viable diesel alternative and Ethanol, a type of alcahol, as a substitute or additive for petrol based engines. Although this seems like a good solution we still demand huge amounts of fuel to power our modern lives. Questions are being raised about how much bio fuel can be produced without impacting on our farmers ability to provide essential food crops. The conversion and refining process also requires large amounts of energy.

Another solution involves the use of electric power to augment a conventional CO2 emitting engine. There are some very impressive implimentaions of this from the major manufacturers although questions again are being raised at the amount of CO2 generated in the production of these cars and particulalry the batteries which store the power and will only last for 100,000 miles or so. Once again we seem only to have a partial solution to the answer. Is is possible to combine the two approaches? We have yet to see a hybrid diesel engine but a petrol/ethanol mix with electrical supplimentation is a practical application. Is this enough to reverse the thread of major catastrophic climate change?

There are millions of cars around already and it will not be practical to convert these. We have to ask what causes the largest emissions of CO2 and take a view that the humble motorist emits little more than a minute portion of the total CO2 and then we need to make some serious lifestyle changes if we are really serious about reducing climate change. A consumer driven society with its throwaway and replace an item mentality needs to change. We also need to travel less and work from home. Growing our own food will further reduce our carbon footprint. So the answer to the problem is not to spend more money on "Green" technology we need quite simply to spend less money, evaluating our needs and denying our wants. This is perhaps not realistic, people adopt the "let others go first" mentality and we are left with a problem that is not being sorted and have big business corporations and governments around the world profiting from the "green" revolution.