[Paul Norman]

I think for a solution, it breaks into two areas really. Both assume that the high prices are here to stay.

1. Seriously change our behaviour. For most, this lacks practicality, but there are opputunities to used the car less.

2. Government could think properly about affordable, joined up public transport. The challenge is that the infrastructure is not there, or the politcal will, however the time scales quoted could be shortened if desired. And big improvements could be made early.

The difficulty is, if we did move from the car to the train, for example, the government would have no choice but to tax something to get money from us!

There does need to be some high level debate, and I would love to join in, and be positive and proactive, because there are solutions. My main frustration, apart from the actual fuel bills, is the lack of high level honesty about what is really happening.

[Alvin]

Originally Posted by RedEvo

Excellent, I want one.

Have you worked out the CO2 generated to charge them up ?



d

of course the emissions are the same as my cat after he has had a bowl of Iams.

Seriously they are great little tools for fair weather city travel,no parking problems,can get anywhere you can walk.

I can get up a 1 in 4 hill using just power,so these machines are no gimick.

Alvin

[JohnG]

Originally Posted by Alvin

Seriously they are great little tools for fair weather city travel,no parking problems,can get anywhere you can walk.

I can get up a 1 in 4 hill using just power,so these machines are no gimick.

Alvin

In spite of being not far off Alvin's age (I suspect) I use a proper man-powered bike tho I wonder how much CO2 I generate when I'm puffing up hill. It's just that you work up a real sweat so might not be very nice to know when you arrive. I live in a rural area which helps: really dangerous cycling in town these days.

I think the problem we have in this ountry is that G Brown is so desperate to get all the tax revenue he can to fund his irresponsible spending that he rather likes very high fuel prices. Not only does he get the tax on fuel but also the increased VAT (ie a tax on a tax) due to the sky high prices; it comes to billions extra tax for him to fritter away.

I can only think this is the reason why he taxes diesel fuel so highly as this has a huge knock on effect on prices of everything else, and hence we'll shortly have very high inflation if he doesn't reduce this tax.

That's why politicians don't really want to know about helping the motorists - and of couse GB is not one himself, but maybe he won't have his ministerial car for much longer.......

.

[Acknowledged Web]

Its because its the Labour Party, people would literally take being beaten around the head every day rather see the Tory's back. Tax tax tax tax tax and no one says a b****y thing.

Harriet Harmon on TV saying how terrible it would be to have Tories back because they are all toffs who went to private school and don't understand how real people live - So the fact she Born in London in 1950 into a professional background - daughter of a Harley Street consultant and niece of the late Lord Longford – attended the most exclusive girls school in the country - St Paul's Girls' School.

Hypercrits all as bad as each other, I hope they all have the best intentions but over time they loose contact with real life, and power corrupts unfortunately.

Thats not to say I think a cabinet should be made up from 12 Etoniens either, just a bit ohf honesty.

[Acknowledged Web]

Do you realise over 75% of the price of petrol is tax and all this gumf about the rising price of crude oil is true but its less than 10% of what makes up petrol, so how nice of Mr Brown to not increase the duty on petrol by 2p more until October thats going to make all the difference then, it'll probably be £1.30 a litre by then. Thats whats being estimated.

Makes me really angry.

[henry cliff]

Fuel hike impacts over all commodities so before increasing the petroleum products so Govt should think and guess what will happen after increasing the fuel price

[Moneymaker]

When the price per barrel is going up how would a protest help? My hypothesis is just that oil-exporters are starting to notice how valuable their export is. Also the governments use the profit as a big portion of their budget. With everyone so reliant on fuel it doesn't seem that a protest would work out to well because it is not something that most people would be willing to stop buying! Well me at least!

[Nicksyb]

A question I posed to my work colleagues today was -

'How come a couple of years back when the price of petrol hit the £1 mark we protested and brought the country to a near stand still which helped lower the cost if I remember rightly. So how come this time when in my area petrol has just hit £1.29 and Diesel £1.30 the same hasn't happened with the protests etc?'

I suppose what I am trying to get at is that all these protests that everyone has organised have not really done much apart from slow down travelling, where as if we did what happened before (see above) then we might actually get the governments attention.

[boxby]

The real problem with greenhouse gases isn't cars - its cows!!!
I know a landfill site that is generating all its own electric and making significant chunks of dosh by selling to the national grid electricity that it's generated from the methane from the decomposing rubbish - now, how do we apply that to cows.........