[OT] Gas Prices

[Darrin Drader]

Alright, this showed up as spam, but I think that it has a great deal of potential if people would just buy into it.




Join the resistance!!!!

I hear we are going to hit close to $3.00 a gallon by the summer. 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 it and join with us!

By now you're probably thinking gasoline priced at about $1.50 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $1.97 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 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 about thirty 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 and DON"T purchase ANY gasoline from EXXON and MOBIL. 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 email 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. PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $1.30 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

 

[Crothian]

Actually, gas prices need to go up so that alternate energy sources will be looked into because of the cost of gas would be too high. Not a popular opinion, I know.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Actually, gas prices need to go up so that alternate energy sources will be looked into because of the cost of gas would be too high.

Actually I agree that we do need to look into alternate forms of energy because at some point the oil will run out. On the other hand, there are no other modes of transportation available for me to get to work, and I need to be able to afford to go to work so I can pay my bills. High gas prices are not helping the economy at all, and ultimately, this can only hurt the oil companies in the long run when fewer people are driving because they're unemployed.

 

[Crothian]

I just wanted to thow that point out there, as few people have thought that way.

 

[Darrin Drader]

No, you are absolutely dead-on with that point. Well. everything except for it being OK for the prices to rise part. I've just seen price gouging first-hand from previous employers and it always stinks.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

I don't have my own car yet (pfaughh!) but when I do, I want to seriously look into getting myself one of those electric/gas cars. Great mileage, and low pollution. Fits my hippie nature.

 

[robaustin]

<sigh>

I wish folks would look up their spam on Snopes.com before they post it. See:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/gasout.htm

For complete debunk on how this won't work in the slightest.

Claim: Boycotting a couple of gasoline brands will bring overall gas prices down.
Status: False.

--*Rob

 

[DM_Matt]

Well, we WILL transition to hydrogen fuel cell cars in the long run. Its pretty much the only thing that the enironmentalists and the Bush administration agree on.

The thing is that the only way to produce these cells without getting the hydrogen from natural gas (thus requiring fossil fuels AND emitting greenhouse gasses) is to use some other kinf of energy to split the hydrogen from water

However, there is really no good answer to the alternative energy mess for now.

Solar and Wind power are intermittant, horrifically expensive and inefficient, and reuire tremendous amounts of rescources and land to build. Unfortunately, a lot of those problems are inherant.

Hydroelectric dams have been placed in most spots where they would be useful, and they destroy the local ecosystems and silt up and become useless eventually anyway.

Ethanal is a non-solution that just plain sux for a variety of reasons. Only Archer Daniels Midland and those who their lobbyits pay a lot of money to have any desire to use it.

Nuclear power has potential, but people fear it far more than if rational. More and more scientists are advocating it, but at the end of the day no one will ever forget Chernobyl, even tohugh that reactor and its crew were, as pretty much everything the soviets had, rediculously substaandard. That plant could not ahv ebeen legally built anywhere else in the world.

There are a lot more problems with these sources that I havent even bothered listing. Their future is unfortunately not too bright.

 

[drothgery]

Also, the notion that high gas prices are an Evil Oil Company Conspiracy is incorrect. There are a lot of real reasons why oil prices are going up; explaining them would be outside the scope of this forum.

And I say this even though I just filled up my car for $2.17/gal yesterday.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I don't always take Snopes.com as the final authority on some of these issues. This is one of them, although I do agree that they make some solid points. Two additional points to consider:

1. Gas prices right now are being artificially inflated.
2. A boycot of the major gasoline companies will directly hurt their profit margins because they won't be selling their gas at retail price to their consumers, and they will have to pay the overhead on their gas stations. Even if they end up selling some of their gas to the other companies, this may have the effect of starting a price war, or at the very least, encourage them to drop their prices in order to make their direct outlet more profitable.