Well done Morrisons et al
You never know it might go below the £1.00 mark again… But even that would be still too high

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Isn’t this what happens every year? Prices go up at the start of the ‘summer’ when the light evenings arrive and people go out more. Then stay high through the ‘holiday’ months of July and August and drop down once the high useage drops off when the evenings darken and people stay in. I thinks its called profiteering or ‘rip off Britain’, as usual we all put up with it.

A few years back in Canada the truckers organised a a word of mouth campaign to boycott completely one of the major retailers. After about a week with almost no sales at any of the retailers outlets, they were forced to drastically drop their price to tempt customers back. The price drop meant other retailers had to follow for fear of the same tactic.

The Consumer has the power if we all stick together.

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Y Mab Darogan: Just for your information, petrol SHOULD be at around 74p per litre if you base it on price of crude oil. It was not far off that price in February 2007, when crude was at $97.88 per barrel, the same price as it was at noon today, Friday! In other words, oil has dropped from $145 a barrel in April this year, (when all the fuel companies felt the need to push prices up), to $97.88 today, but prices of fuel at the pumps has dropped by pennies, nowhere near the same percentage as crude. As a matter of interest, on the subject of biodiesel, you may want to consider how it is that the producers of “green” diesel can take 1 litre of raw material, (vegetable oil, after growing, harvesting and paying farmers a profit), then filter it, treat it, process, add 40% duty and 17.5% VAT, and then deliver it to the pumps as diesel for £1.20 a litre, whereas you or I cannot buy that same vegetable oil in a supermarket for under £1.50 a litre, and veg oil hasn’t got 40% duty added! Methinks that there’s been a tacit agreement between government and veg oil suppliers to allow them to work against the public interest through price-fixing so that nobody can effectively make their own diesel from virgin oil any more. When the raw material costs MORE than the finished industrially-produced product, it’s time to suspect cartels, profiteering and government insouciance, much as we also see in the fuel and utilities industries at the moment. This government won’t step in to regulate as it’s all money into their pockets through tax.

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we are about 3 or 4 months behind the oil barrel market, so petrol may be down to 99p a litre by january, but i am sure harold peasebody like me will be concerned at the price of winter hay for his horse

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Winter hay should be down as we have had a good quality crop this year despite the weather (proof that Global Warming is a myth)- I presume that has been the same in Devon? I know my hay is the best I’ve ever made with no Agro-chemical fertilisers!

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a farming friend of mine has been waiting in devon since july to harvest his hay. he has been told that winter hay will be about £4 a bale and he has £10,000 of hay to harvest. with 10 days of good weather and another 10 days to come he may at last get his winter feed in. this has been the worst summer i can remember, last year was bad but we had a decent aug. and sept. i expect the rainy summer is behind the twisting iron bridge. any way harold’s mare will not starve this winter, even old tom cobley’s grey mare will be fed this winter!

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Huw,

In the last one hundred years, we have gone from virtually the birth of the motor car to today where we have individual transport for almost all of us. We have gone from the earliest attempts at flight to travel to outer space. We have enough oil left for at least a couple of hundred years even at the current rising levels of demand.

Do you really think we will still be so reliant on oil in 100 years time given the acceleration we have seen in technology in the past 100 years?

Assuming the ‘say ‘no’ to everything’ Luddites in the environmental lobby don’t scupper everything that technology tries to do for us, I think we can rely on mankind’s ingenuity to solve the often-overstated problem of oil supplies running out.

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I didnt make any hay last years as the weather was never settled – so much for these hotter warmer summers we are meant to be having! Lucky I had plenty in stock from previous years and strip grassed the hay meadow. Was a relief to get this yeras in, so I appreciate your anxiety if you haven’t got it in yet. Don’t expext you will get it now though – too late. But here’s my tip, let the horses graze the grass and go into the winter fat. Fat is a great energy source and the natural cycle for equines – they really will come out of the winter really healthy. I always use this technique and onlt feed hay in the winter. A vet visited in March one year and could’t believe how well they were done outside on hay alone.

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about time too, oil prices down nearly 40%, petrol prices down less than 10%, I wonder who’s getting rich there, then messers, exxon, shell et al, I think the chancellor should windfall tax these oil giants

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petrol as long as the price of oil stays low should continue to fall and hay is fuel the same as petrol so lucy has as much right to comment on it as harold or any one else. we have had 12 days of brilliant sunshine down here in deepest devon with more to come. it does not make up for a poor summer, but it will ensure a late successful harvest

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Lucy, you say I am blind.

Please help me to see by giving your real name.

I tend to have more confidence in information which is freely available in peer-reviewed scientific literature or in the broadsheets than in people who are abusive to others from behind pseudonyms.

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brilliant news about the hay, now i just have to find a way to run my car on the stuff.

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this is a discgrace, oil prices are well down, we should only be paying about 80p now, based on how much they put it up, its just not fair, where is the government to help promote competitiion in the market, back the consumer and help the little guy more please, not cosy up to big business

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Peter, all the things you say about technology in your first paragraph (#13) are true.

In fact I share your optimism that mankind can sort our problems out.

The GREEN NEW DEAL (available on the new economics foundation website) is a very optimistic document which sets out ideas for investing in a green industrial revolution.

However, one of the first things that people, who want to deal with their problems, have got to do is to recognise that they have a problem.

That was why George W. Bush’s ‘addicted to oil’ speech was, in many ways, such a major turning point in awareness of the issues.

If even the most environmentally disastrous leader in the world had this insight, then others could no longer deny that shrinking supply and rising demand of oil, and the damaging effects of burning oil were things that human societies across the planet had to confront.

And quickly.

However, it seems that you DO deny the above, Peter.

In January 2008 the head of car giant General Motors publicly warned that the switch to electric cars was now inevitable and that motorists may soon become familiar with the phrase “peak oil”.

If even he and George Bush can see these things coming, why can’t you, Peter?

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Huw: I see, you have walked away in defeat from my comment #16 – good, one-nil to me!

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