That's bizarre...but you heard an echo of it in Old Tool's statements. Me, I'd rather invest in small-scale distributed technology like that than build a whole lot of coal-fired power plants.

 

Lots of oil companies in Europe are rebranding themselves as "energy conpanies" - for example BP are entirely known by this name as opposed to the name the two letters stand for (namely British Petroleum), now I know that this isn't the only reason they've done this - but it can only help cultivate a new image, eh?

For Tenguy: It is entirely possible to live "off grid" in all respects - electricity, home heating/cooling, and water!

 

I mentioned this earlier on this thread. You where I'm hearing all the emphasis and incentives going; Clean coal technology. In other words keep burning coal but put CO2 scrubbers on them. Here's the dirty little secret of coal fired generators out here. It's not the CO2 they are hiding its the mercury.

Also they are going to push for natural gas fired generators which are much easier and cheaper to set up on smaller scales but still rely on fossil fuels to electrical generation.

It's like I keep screaming; the major oil and energy companies have done a great job of buying our government and brainwashing the public. The great example of which is now Chevron and Exxon Mobil and BP are leaders in the fight against global warming. Just watch their ads.

 

Oh Igor I wish I'd have seen this a second ago. Do you know what most people in the US think BP stands for after a very extensive advertising campaign. They think it stands for Beyond Petroleum. Don't you just love it.

And something I've pointed out a hundred times on this forum. Do you know who is now the two leading companies out here in the west for oil and natural gas production. BP and Encana. Thats right. British Petroleum and Energy Company of Canada are the supposed owners of your oil and gas. And surely you can guess why. Its harder if not impossible to impose windfall profit taxes on foreign companies.

 

If I'm fair I actually think that you, Stumbler, pointed out the magic transition of oil companies into energy companies on one of the multitude of similar threads to this one. Once mentioned it, I started watching and low and behold that's what they're doing.

They're rebranding as trusted brands, and when all the oil's gone they'll be there to lead us merrily to big profits for them by touting the "latest" technological energy production methods. I think (if I'm reading his tone right) that this is what Tenguy objects to - having somebody make a profit from things that are essentially free to all (namely the Sun). How much profit did Royal Dutch Shell announce this week?

 

You are exactly right. The same with exxon mobile and the largest corporate profits in history. And what drives me nuts is it is just so obvious if you just look and remember what they were saying a year ago or sometimes even a month ago.

I had the shocking experience of doing a search of global warming and actually I was just going to revisit a site that debunked a lot of the stuff that said global warming was not human caused. Instead I searched the exact same terms and found nothing but page after page of sites that said global warming was a myth and other such nonsense. I had to go back three pages on my search before I found the site I was looking at just one or two days before.

I was horrified to find that the oil companies could actually manipulate the information on the web just by hiring enough PR firms to flood the net with their message.

But what horrified me even more is I sat right there and watched the oil companies and our President Bush do an abrupt about face on global warming in less than the space of a months time just like they had always been in agreement with the scientists of the world and were diligently working on the problem.

That right there should have resulted in a mass bullshit being called on them but instead the public is still willing to believe their bunk and let them control the agenda while we give them the biggest profits in history some of which come at the expense of things like the war in Iraq.

 

That's the really salient point: why would anyone actually believe them? I know people are a little bit reluctant to accept the idea that their government lies to them (although I would think they would have ample evidence of it by now), but why would ANYONE believe what a major oil company told them, whether it's about global warming or alternative energy?

 

Here's why and its kind of common knowledge in the oilfield. The oil companies are always planning 20 years ahead of the public and so we get led by the nose by that extent. What has really changed however is how well they now control not just ours but most the major governments of the world. They also hire the best ad and PR firms in the business and tap into what we have been discussing on another thread; our fear.

You should have seen the panic and I mean actual panic in action and deeds during the so called energy crisis of the 1970's. Programs like 60 minutes and Meet the Press ran several programs exposing the actual fraud that was taking place but it had no effect whats so ever in the mind of the public which was stampeding to gas lines, hording gas and willing to pay any price for it.

Since then, however, the purchase of our government and new media has just compounded the problem. Energy conservation, the economy, credit management, consumer spending and even the latest economic stimulus package are nothing but moves on the part of the oil monopoly to keep the ball rolling their way.

Now I fully expect that to be challenged but its just as real as invading Iraq being the answer to securing a previously unavailable source of Mid-East oil now that Saudi Arabia is starting to dry up.

The next terrorist threat we will have to face will come from the West Coast of Africa where we are continuing the same patterns of exploitation of the many in order to guarantee maximum return profits on the world oil monopoly.

 

You won't be challeged by me on this; I studied economic geology and petroleum geology as an undergraduate - the oil industry runs the only successful natural resource cartel on the planet. Partly because they have carved a particular niche in global geo-politics by moving from national companies into massive multi-nationals with concerns in a vast array of ancillary services.

 

The real coup was when they talked the Saudi royal family into allowing Aramco (a consortium of American oil companies) to be their agent in the production and distribution of Saudi crude oil. And they're now trying to make sure they get the same kind of deal from the Iraqi government. Some interesting history here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco

 

Did anyone happen to see the documentary on (I think) Sundance two nights ago. It investigated the trend for foreign governments to use oil as a political weapon.

The big three are Venezuela, Iran & Russia. They are actively using their vast reserves to directly influence regional and global politics.

This trend is not a new one, but it is the first one that will probably succeed in severely reducing effective representative democratic governments.

OPEC was used for financial and internal political gains, this is totally different.

Now before a few posters start ranting about how it is us that started it, I concede to that point. However, now it is the western world that will pay dearly, perhaps with collapse.

 

Let me add a piece of personal history here. About 30 years ago I asked a really good toolpusher on the rig I was on why it cost a $100 for a pipe wrench at the rig when I could go down to the local department store and buy the same wrench for $30. His answer was "Ain't you figured that out yet junior. It's because it ain't but five guys that actually own the whole oilfield and every dime spent in it goes right back into their pockets.

Way to go Kimiko and if you needed any visual proof all you had to do was see Bush literally dancing with them and kissing them (ass included) on his trip throught the Middle east.

Now just to prove I don't know everything and am not as smart as I think I am, I did not find out until last night that Henry Ford designed is model A's to run on both Ethanol and/or alcohol instead of gasoline. That's when the major oil companies poured millions of dollars (and those were 1920 dollars) into the Prohibition movement. A decade later they helped make sure hemp became illegal in the US.

 

Close, they were designed to run on Kerosene. Any internal combustion engine will run on ethanol, you just need to adjust ignition timing and fuel/air mixtures. Henry's Fords, as well as most every other automobile made in that era, had timing and mixture controls for the driver. This was because the wide quality range in fuels of the day.

 

Don't you ever get tired of pretending you know stuff just to have me prove you wrong?

The real reason for alcohol prohibition

As an interesting aside, I learned from Adrian Clarke that alcohol prohibition may have ended at the request of the oil companies, as the illegal stills set up to provide bootleg booze were being turned into sources of fuel. Apparently, there was even hemp ethanol production!

In an email to me, Clarke wrote; “I asked an historian who was working as a senior adviser to our Victorian State Government what he thought about the proposition that Prohibition was enacted to protect the Oil Companies and at their request, from the self-sufficiency hemp gave to farmers and other drivers. The historian had worked in American Universities and said he would consult his network. Three weeks later he called me to confirm absolutely that Prohibition was to stop people making their own car fuel. He said that records showed that up to 90% of all the illegal alcohol made up to that time, was for the fueling of cars. ... This historian did not go public.”

I attempted to verify this information, and found out that Henry Ford originally designed his “Model A” car to run on either alcohol or gasoline, whichever was available to the driver – and that John D. Rockefeller, owner of Standard Oil (now Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, American BP and a dozen other oil companies), put 4 million dollars into alcohol prohibition.(46) After alcohol prohibition began, Ford proposed that the dead capacity of shutting down distilleries might be used to produce denatured alcohol - "a cleaner, nicer, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline". (47) Veteran hemp activist Chris Conrad writes that Ford's dream of a nation of plant-powered vehicles was “thwarted first by alcohol prohibition, then by hemp prohibition”. (48)

The plan to shut down alcohol fuel through alcohol prohibition may have backfired. The number of illegal alcohol stills increased during alcohol prohibition.(49) Thus, in a celebrated 1932 letter, subsequently printed on the front page of The New York Times, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a lifelong
teetotaler, argued against the continuation of alcohol prohibition due to the “increase in disrespect for the law”. This letter became the singular event that pushed the nation to repeal alcohol prohibition.(50) This concern of John D. Jr. may be considered suspect, for as any good Rockefeller historian will point out, the Rockefellers themselves had been known to disrespect the law from time to time.(51) Perhaps John D was really concerned that people would become less dependent on his oil if they had their own stills, and he adopted the “disrespect for the law” concern to hide the self-interested motive behind his change of opinion. And then I stumbled on this bit of information:" Fifty years ago it was a corporate alliance between DuPont (which controlled GM) and Standard Oil (now Exxon) which suppressed Henry Ford's alcohol gasoline engine and committed the continent to using lead as an additive." (52) DuPont and Standard Oil ... hmmmm
https://hemp-ethanol.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

PS the guy that invented the Diesel motor which carries his hame to this day never invisioned it would run on anything else except fuel extracted from hemp

 

I thought lead was added to make petrol burn better? I understood the reason for this was because it doesn't burn as efficiently as diesel (due to the longer hydrocarbon chains).

 

Sorry Stumber, you where not wrong, the guy you quoted was. Henry Ford's engineers designed the the MODEL T, 20 years before the Model A, to run on gasoline or ethanol. The Model A was designed to run on either Gasoline or Kerosene (or coal oil). As I stated, any engine in cars of that era would run on ethanol as well as gasoline.

To suggest that prohibition was started by big oil is absurd, it was started by the Christian Fundementalists of the day, the Temperence Union.

It did make interesting reading though, for a fantasy.

 

Yes, it was added to raise the octane number. When it was banned, it was replaced by MTBE in some places, until they found out that MTBE contaminated groundwater. Now it's been largely replaced by ethanol.

 

TetraEthylLead was added to fuels to make them burn more evenly, it was cheaper to do that than to further refine gasoline to higher octane ratings.

It was escential to use LEADed fuel in high compression engines to prevent pre-ignition or knock.

 

Sorry, Kimi didn't mean to repeat you.

 

That's okay, happens all the time.