Boycotting Oil Companies.

[Brendan]

This just popped into my inbox but I can?t properly trace the originator.

I?m all for consumer action and will always go out of my way to cause even the slightest bit of annoyance to any person or organisation that has a disproportionate amount of power. I am just curious if anyone else has seen this or knows where it originates from? Is it valid consumer action or just corporate vindictiveness?

See below.

?We are hitting ?1.23 a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying ?2.00 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 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 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 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?

[Horsebox]

I quite sure that the same mail went around about a year ago. Snopes says it is a false chain mail..

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/gasout.asp

[SeanMacGabhann]

It's essentially retarded on every level

Apart from adopting the discredited pyramid format ("If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)... " etc etc it's wilfully narrow-sighted

"they" have apparently "conditioned us"....

Whatever

Look it - apart from the fact that this country uses fuel duty to keep other taxes down (other countries with lower fuel duties have higher taxation in other areas - who knew!) I just cannot believe that as a people, as a species, we have had warnings about fuel shortages for decades and when faced with the distinct possibility that, rather than talk, this might actually be happening,idiots like this send weird emails out blaming "big companies" or "the government"

Yes, prices are manipulated to varying degrees in different countries - but the message remains consistent - oil is far from an infinite resource. If there was, for a FACT, 1 barrel of crude oil left in the WHOLE planet, someone somewhere would still say "well, I need to drive to work"

Time would be better spent adapating to a lack of oil, or finding replacements. Yes many people do need a car and yes many people do nee dto drive to work and yes global food supplies rely on transportation. But it's not beyond our ken to rethink a lot of that is it?

Of course the email maybe generated by a computer as a joke.....

[Nero]

Just drive less. It'll be inconvenient but not that much. And when you do drive, try to reduce consumption by keeping the vehicle light, not changing gears too quickly, not speeding. A lot of driving is unnecessary. It makes lives simpler and quicker, but the downside is congestion and pollution.

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

I prefer to boycott all big corporations cos they are more powerful than most world governments and have eaten up the planet and spewed out their sh!t on all of us in the name of profit.

[????]

Presumably no-one is planning on flying anywhere in the near future?...interestingly that nether seems to count for 'environmentalists'

[SeanMacGabhann]

but it;'s not because corporations are inherently "big" and "evil" as a conscious being

Legal requirement means they HAVE to expand and do ANYTHING to increase shareholder value - morals don't come into it. If you became chairperson of BP tomorrow Chav, you could not change their policy because if you implemented any policy which reduced shareholder value (say reducing whatever ethically dubious policy they currently undertake) then you would be out of a job and probably legally charged

There isn't a monster in charge of these places - he/she (oh go on - probably a he) is usually a nice person with kids/friends/blood - same as everyone else. When consumers (us lot) stop demanding their product, they will respond

[????]

*never

also see maloproprisms fred

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

Yep and that's the problem. If I ruled the world i'd take away corporations right to be a legal entity and make the people who run them directly liable for what they do instead. Corporations are psychopathic frankenstein's monsters and need to be broken down to a more human size, with human values again.

[SeanMacGabhann]

whooah - I said if you ran a company! Not sure I want even you (or any individual) ruling the world!

[Brendan]

?Legal requirement means they HAVE to expand and do ANYTHING to increase shareholder value - morals don't come into it.?

Eh? Is the law not just an organized, social expression of human morality?

If it isn?t there is something seriously fuckedup with society.

[Marmora Man]

You do better by usng your car more sensibly

Driving Sensibly

than by following the course recommended by the wannabe chain letter enthusiast.

There's a mathematical flaw in his argument anyway - it has been established that we are, generally speaking, just 6 or 7 degrees of separation from anyone else in the world. If I e-mail 10 friends and they e-mail 10 friends etc it is a certainty that over the course of six "generations" many people will receive the same message from many different sources, reducing the growth in subscribers dramatically.

BTW - it might be interesting to test the 6 / 7 degrees of separation theory on EDF members - but how would we do it?

[Brendan]

What I don?t get is this. Each of us has 2 parents, 4 Grandparents, 8 Great-grandparents etc. There is this ever expanding number people trailing off, ad infinitum into the murky depths of history responsible for our singular existence.

So surely the world?s population must be getting smaller with every generation.

[Brendan]

Marmora Man Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> BTW - it might be interesting to test the 6 / 7

> degrees of separation theory on EDF members - but

> how would we do it?

You could try to do it by setting a reference point like a town perhaps and then seeing how many steps it takes each person to get back to that town.

[Marmora Man]

Brendan Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Marmora Man Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

>

> > BTW - it might be interesting to test the 6 / 7

> > degrees of separation theory on EDF members -

> but

> > how would we do it?

>

> You could try to do it by setting a reference

> point like a town perhaps and then seeing how many

> steps it takes each person to get back to that

> town.

Would need to be an obscure town - if we used Sydney, Washington or Pari many would get from there back in one leap?

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

A town called Alice?

[Brendan]

that's easy. My uncle was town planner for most of the 1980's.