This speech is taken directly from the BP website!!

Do you think there is a chance it may have been put there in order to make the company look like a respectable, caring, sharing, environment-loving company?

Lets not forget BP are committed to expanding oil extracting by over 3% each year, have funded paramilitary death squads in Colombia (www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk), are the driving force behind the environmentally and socially disastrous Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline (www.baku.org.uk) and have cut safety precautions left, right and centre to increase profitability at the cost of employee’s lives.

Yes, Peak Oil is fast approaching. Yes, BP are aware of that (they are not stupid). But, we should not believe that just because they put out some corporate spin greenwash bullshit that they will be changing their ways.

It is amazing how easily people can be duped !

"Peak Oil" is almost entirely a creation of the oil companies aided by fools like Greenpeace who didn't take the time to do basic research. The Earth's oil reserves are massive and at present consumtion levels will continue to provide energy needs for at least 500 years but of course oil companies need to create the idea of "shortages" because it helps to maintain high prices. Big oil producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia talk up falling reserves for the same reason.

Don't fall for the hype instead question why we are paying so much for oil at the moment and who benefits from it

"Do you think there is a chance it may have been put there in order to make the company look like a respectable, caring, sharing, environment-loving company?"

Yes. This is quite obvious.

"Lets not forget BP are committed to expanding oil extracting by over 3% each year, have funded paramilitary death squads in Colombia (www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk), are the driving force behind the environmentally and socially disastrous Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline (www.baku.org.uk) and have cut safety precautions left, right and centre to increase profitability at the cost of employee’s lives."

I am fully aware of BP's activities around the globe.

"Yes, Peak Oil is fast approaching. Yes, BP are aware of that (they are not stupid). But, we should not believe that just because they put out some corporate spin greenwash bullshit that they will be changing their ways."

The point is not that they are aware of the peak oil situation: this has been known by all the oil producers for some time. The point is that it is quite significant that a major oil producer is publicly acknowledging the Peak Oil situation and the impact on 'business as usual' (even if this is understated by their publication).

If you think that I am suggesting that there will be any sudden altruistic acts from the oil companies then apologies if the posting was misleading. Also apologies if this seems to be irrelevant.

Thank you.

Who do you think benefits the most financially from the Iraq invasion in the UK ?

You've said it, it is BP (and its sharereholders).

Allez, goodbye.

Hire Bob Geldof and Bono, distribute thousands of Gucci goodie bags to your customers and you'll soon have an ass as clean as the G8 leaders, especially if some evil doers kill some more innocents on your behalf at the same time.

People won't even think anymore of the dramatic rise of their energy bill in the last two years.

Anyway it's all the AlQaeda suicide bombers' fault anyway, isn't it ?

Those who leave 16 bombs in the boot of their rented car in Luton, so that they can suicide themselves four more times.

"enough oil resevers for 500 years"

might want to check out this clever little website where it is argued (to my satisfaction) that oil WILL run out in the next 50 years

 http://oiltruth.com/


"Don't fall for the hype instead question why we are paying so much for oil at the moment and who benefits from it"

we´re paying so much cause the capitalist banking system needs the cashflow and BP, Shell etc need their profits

 http://oiltruth.com/

"The Earth's oil reserves are massive and at present consumtion levels will continue to provide energy needs for at least 500 years but of course oil companies need to create the idea of "shortages" because it helps to maintain high prices. Big oil producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia talk up falling reserves for the same reason."

If this were true then we can be thankful that we have more than enough time to seriously adjust and downscale our lives to fit around the future energy shortage (a more sane approach to the problem) or get yet another technological fix for technological fixes that got us into this predicament in the first place.

The chances that the world will be using present day quantities of oil for the next 500 years is not very high especially with the increasing oil requirements of China and India.

This scenario is still in ignorance that the remaining oil will become more and more energy intensive and so eventually the oil remaining in the ground will be too expensive to extract, especially since the remaining oil tends to be of low quality.

If you were to believe some, such as Daniel Yergin (  http://www.cera.com/home/ ), then the end of the oil age is not upon us. He says that the share of "unconventional oil" such as the Canadian oil sands, ultra-deep-water developments, "natural gas liquids", will rise from 10 percent of total capacity in 1990 to 30 percent by 2010.

Again, this approach is simply putting all our eggs in the one basket of future technologies and is in ignorance of that fact that it will be a very expensive, energy intensive process to replace conventional oil with these unconventional sources. As the price of energy rises the costs of producing these unconventional oils rises with it.

This still ignores the problems of climate change brought about by the continued use of fossil fuels.

As James Kunstler puts it in his latest blog entry...

"It is a generally accepted fact that roughly two thirds of the remaining oil lies under the Middle East, and another substantial fraction is in Central Asia. That is to say, it belongs either to people who hate us, or to landlocked countries on the farthest side of the globe (next door to China)."

The worst thing is that even if people such as Daniel Yergin and his predictions are correct, it is only delaying the inevitable. Unless we start to make changes to our dependence on cheap oil and soften the blow of this transitional period (and there is a good chance that we are a bit late for this) we will be forced to deal with this pending calamity the hard way.

It is not simply a personal transportation problem. The food supply chain has become dependent on cheap oil. The machinery that makes medium to large scale intensive farming possible is dependent on cheap oil. The transportation network that delivers food to supermarkets is dependent on it. The pesticides used for intensive farming are made from oil. Have we got the time to rebuild localised, organic systems of food production on the scale that would replace the food currently being produced by the agribusiness'?


"All truth passes through 3 stages...
1st it is ridiculed.
2nd it is violently opposed.
3rd it is accepted as being self-evident"

- Schopenhauer

"fools like Greenpeace"

I think you'll find that their track record in highlighting environmental issues, fighting governments and companies alike, and of course getting blown up for their troubles more than speaks for itself.

I assume those happy to chuck around such critical comments can boast an equally successful cv?

How to talk to an economist about peak oil
 http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/07/how_to_talk_to.html