I hesitate to ask this as the answer might be obvious, and I have simply missed it, but both Shell and BP have recently posted record profits. The reason, often quoted is the rise in oil and gas prices due to the awful Putin. But how can this be?
I would have thought that the oil companies put up prices to allow for the costs they were incurring, a bit like me putting up the fuel costs I get as reimbursement on my dog journeys. I didn’t make a profit before because I was a volunteer, still am, and I didn’t, don’t, make a profit later, now.
Or, heavens forbid, are they really using it as an excuse to put them up and not down again, merely to increase their profits?
Hmm, but are they so stupid not to realise that behaving like this might well encourage a government to inflict massive taxes and restrictions upon them?
Back to my dog journeys. The reason why I was asked to drive thousands of kms per year was because the only other volunteers in the main could not spend nights away from home. Now that I can’t do those long journeys any more I know they have great difficulty in moving dogs around France. Ironically, cross border movements are not a problem because the professionals they use drop dogs off at rdvs all over France and thus easily reached by adopters. But purely intranational movements posed a real problem and they began to use a woman from Brittany who decided that this was a good business for her. So she started adding profits to her charges and has priced herself out of the market, even it that meant the market no longer existed, in other words less dogs are now moved and adopted and more spend time in pensions.
Perceived being the operative word. It turned out that there was no actual shortage.
In practice very little has been done. I’m not sure how much of BP’s massive profit was realised in the UK but the £600 million or so windfall tax seems like a slight slap on the wrist compared with doubling their profit from 2020.
Tut tut, they only ever do anything with the benefit and wellbeing of their fellow humans, everything is for the good of mankind not in anyway grubby profiteering…
I’m sure I’ve shared this before but the profits the oil (and gas) industry make are easily enough to bribe politicians.
A new analysis has disclosed that the oil and gas industry has delivered $2.5bn a day in profit for the past 50 years.
According to Professor Aviel Verbruggen, the analysis’ author, the massive sum collected by petrostates and fossil fuel industries since 1970 is $52tn, enabling the potential to “purchase every politician, every system” and delay action on the climate catastrophe we currently face.
True but their thought processes are such short term they dont actually care. If Elon Musk gave the cons a bucket load of money electric vehicles would be top of the list of priorities
