BP Loses Australian Bid to Trademark Green

…..However, Justice William Gummow was skeptical: “It might be inherently adapted to mislead, might it not? … What is nature [sic] and healthy about the production or consumption of petroleum products?”

“it was a clever colour to have chosen so many years ago because it is now very much associated with the environmental movement.” A majority of the three judges rejected BP’s application and awarded costs against the company. Despite the setback, BP has registered the colour green in over 20 countries.
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=366768391&url_num=30&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnode%2F6163
jh

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There is a silver lining in peak oil for New Zealand. Once it becomes obvious that peak oil is actually happening there will be a scramble to make dramatic changes to transport systems in a very short time frame. Everybody will be looking for off the shelf solutions and New Zealand can provide three of them.

Designline’s natural gas/electric hybrid buses will be needed to allow bus services to expand without having to compete for shrinking supplies of deisel.

Hamilton Jet’s ferry propulsion units will be in demand in cities with harbours and waterways to relieve the pressure on railways, as they did in New York following 9/11.

Steelbro’s sidelifter container trailers will be needed to meet the rapid increase in demand for intermodal transfers of shipping containers between intercity rail and local trucking. Current intermodal systems are built around interstate rail of containers with intrastate movements still mainly handled by trucks with transfers happening at a small number of large hubs. Peak oil will trigger the rapid development of a large number of small hubs (ie, what we have always had in this country) and traditional container handling equipement is either too big or takes too long to manufacture.

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insider asked “Didn’t Jeanette say …” and “Didn’t Colin Campbell say…”

I don’t know exactly what either of them said – could you reference what they said, rather than make a quote up? Anything else is not good debating.

I had a look through the Greens Peak Oil PRs from 2005,
http://www.greens.org.nz/docs/more_docs.asp?class=PR&cat=133#2005
but I can’t find any where Jeanette prophisises about future prices. And I’m sure that’s because she is careful to be scientific and balanced at all times.

If she ever did state actual figures I bet she said “some experts have predicted”.

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Speculative bubble… not worth defending but I think you should pay more attention to the degree that the oil price is gamed insider.

Since refinery capacity ( Gee, semantics problems too, I should have simply said capacity ) is growing far more slowly than demand and productivity of individual refineries does not keep up, the availability and price of the refined products we actually use is far more dependent on what happens at the refineries than on how far over the peak the oil supply has gotten. I was pointing out the distinct possibility that the refinery capacity is restrained by people who are actual insiders. The folks who run XOM and BP, the Saudis and their good buddy Darth Cheney. They want to keep the profits coming. They know that the patch is going dry. Extra refining capacity might make it far easier to see that more oil can’t be pumped… and would definitely make the profits smaller. You have to think about the larger picture.

Whatever you wish to think about productivity, it isn’t the answer to the shortage of refining capacity. They’re all running flat out 24×7 just as tightly run as any process plant that size can be run. 96% of the capacity is used.

Ignored growth? Me? What in the world gives you that idea? I think about refinery capacity relative to the demand and the margin is shrinking pretty nicely as demand ramps up. Maybe in 5 years or so the capacity will show up in those plants in Indonesia and the mid-east. Right now both are within spitting distance of 80 MBPD and refinery utilization is an unsustainable 96%…. at that rate any plant that goes down means somebody does not get served.

If more capacity comes on line, it may well become impossible to fill some of the input pipes to somebody’s refineries. I suggest that the restraints in the old-money industry are, as Senator Wyden showed in his report back in 2001, engineered at the corporate level to maintain profit margins. There is ample reason to believe this is true. I speculate only to the extent that the industry may be further guided by political operators not wishing to let people see the cliff they are driving over and others of different politics who want to divert supplies away from the West.

I happen to think those motives exist (profit and politics), exist. I may not agree with them, but too much sh!t happens that fits the theory.

respectfully
BJ

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[Some] people are beginning to wake up to the fact that there is only a limited supply of a vital resource. With demand set to rise from 84.5 million barrels per day to over 110 million within the next 17 years (IEA estimate for 2025 consumption), and supply already showing signs of stagnating and even declining in many countries, what debate is there to be had?

If the ‘peak’ of conventional light crude wasn’t for another 40 years, what would we do with the intervening years? Other than expand our economy, our infrastructure, and our current ways and means of living…meaning that when demand does finally do-in supply, are we better or worse off for having had the extra time to prepare?

Another article worth linking to from energy bulletin
http://www.energybulletin.net/31076.html

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BJ

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the number of refineries has nothing to do with limits on oil production, just as the reduction in western toy factories has nothing to do with reaching peak elves.

It is much more to do with more mundane things like the costs associated with regulations, investment cost and limited demand growth in developed countries, which is where there has been a numeric decline – you ignore the growth in refineries in developing countries. The USA is not the world.

Refinery numbers are irrelevant when capacity increases – it’s called productivity and a process not unique to refining. WHy buid a new refinery to cope with single digit growth in demand when you can do so by tweaking the existing one.

NZRC is a classic example of that happening on our doorstep. Over the last 40 years it has been upgraded in quality and capacity as it makes more sense than building another one in Timaru.

And where it made sense to build a 100kbd plant in the 60s now you would only look at >250kbd as scale is important. That scale puts out of business the small and inefficient.

Turn your theory around, why would NZRC be spending 250 million on an investment with an extremely limited future?

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Maybe we should adopt initiatives like this, only in our country before the US economy takes a nosedive and draps us down with it. http://www.aidg.org/mission.htm.

What are we gonna do when the “Japanese Housewives” are no longer willing to prop up our paper economy or willing to subsidise our consumption driven lifestyles? How are we gonna pay for our power, petrol, or even our groceries when we lose our jobs and our house values collapse? Did anyone read the link I posted awhile back? http://energybulletin.net/23259.html

New Zealand’s No. 8 wire/Kiwi Ingenuity identity is as much of a myth as our “clean green” image.

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Insider

Peak-Oil is here. The price of oil is gamed by the US government and the Saudis with the effect that it’s been raised early to a plateau that they can defend for a while longer. The oil patches themselves are depleted and if you look at the details you’ll see field after field in declining production. This is ONE of the reasons there are so few new refineries. No point. We can refine pretty much everything that we can produce now, so this stricture on demand for the raw product produces extra profits for the refiners and extra price signal early in the cyle to the consumers.

There’s another part to that signal too and it has to do with the US $ which is balanced in astonishing ways as it teeters along the cliff-face. Sheer inflation to the left and deep depression to the right. This is also gamed to the hilt. What comes next?

respectfully
BJ

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Re Energy Bulleton article
Interesting comment about Drudge. When Drudge mentions it it is big news…

I see peak oil as a big winch slowly gripping everything and winding it in.

Maybe the BIG peak will have a wide summit as there is a lot of discretion (perhaps) as in use the car less.
jh

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Didn’t Jeanette say oil would be $100 a barrel in 2005 and that petrol would be $2 by Xmas – 2006!

Didn’t Colin Campbell say oil had peaked in 1989, 1995, 2000, and variously will in 2010, 2007, 2005 and 2010 again?

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“Do we subsidise cars & petrol for the poor now”

We pretty much subsidise them for *everyone* now, through low gas taxes, lax technical standards and not having compulsory insurance. Which makes more difference to the driver of a 1980 Corolla than a brand new Volkswagen.

Of course having low fuel taxes means that the pump price goes up that much more when oil prices increase (because the proportion of the price spent on crude oil is larger) – so people who drive cheap, thirsty cars will get a sudden shock. Especially if they’ve bought a cheap house in the new “edge city” that Barry Curtis wants to build.

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So fish boy, where exactly is the “doomsday-and-don’t-we-deserve-it Fin de siècle glee” in this thread? I can’t see any when I read the thread.

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a round up of responses and commentary on the Independent article and the BP review…

http://www.energybulletin.net/31126.html

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fish_boy

Actually in the 19th Century people didn’t flee “Deep England” to escape the “back breaking labour in the depths of stygian rural ignorance” to the refuge of big cities and labour in the “statanic mills” as you maintain. They were forced from their lands, because the Commons was transferred into private ownership, hence it became an exclusive possession of a few who decided it would be more lucrative to replace people with sheep so that they could meet the demand for wool in Europe. They had no choice, but to seek jobs in those hell-hole Mills. It was either that or starve. Not a choice either you or I will ever have to make. Thank God for the Welfare State.

Yeah no doubt the “Developed World” will continue to screw over the people in the Third World so that we can keep the lifestyle that we have become accustomed to and believe we’re entitled to as they have done since Christopher Columbus. What else is new?

Oh we can continue to believe that there is some technical “magic bullet” that can solve our problems and waste our money in some extravagent “wild goose chase” instead of realising that as a society we can’t continue as we are.

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Reading this thread depresses me. All the doomsday-and-don’t-we-deserve-it Fin de siècle glee here simply goes to prove that the Greens are just another millenialist cult awaiting the end of time. Worse, it goes to show that Green politics is a dead end street with no real answers beyond a middle class Presbyterianism that yearns to see the guilty punished for their pleasures. I’ll tell you all now – trying to force carbon emission reductions won’t stop global warming. Why? Because the democratisation of wealth in places like China and India mean we are in a third industrial revolution right now. trying to stop this is like Canute trying to stop the tide coming in.

First of all, there is no energy crisis. There is enough solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and solid fossil fuel. We are facing a liquid fuels crisis. No more, and no less.

People like their cars – no, they LOVE them. They give them names. They invest them with characters and see them as extensions of their personality and ego. Every society and culture is the same when exposed to the motor car. The car gives them freedom to roam. It frees them from the tyranny of suffocating 19th Century parochialism, a cartoon like, Tolkienesque vision of which so many Greens seem to yearn for. Heads up guys: For 90% of the population “deep England” was a shithole they couldn’t wait to escape to the point that even the dark satanic mills of the early industrial revolution were preferable.

People also love their cheap airline tickets. They love the democratisation of travel. They want to keep going to Marbela, Ibiza, or the Gold Coast or whatever. To return to the world of even 50 years ago would see a shrinking of the horizons for all mankind.

So here is what I think will happen with no realistic alternative policies. The profitability of biofuel crops is going to be the final nail in the coffin for the rainforests. The drive for biofuel for the west with create a Malthusian population crisis in the third world that 80% of Westerners won’t care about. millions will starve to death to fuel our cars and cheap holidays. For us, food will go up in price, but fundamentally it will be business as usual as we screw the third world to maintain our lifestyle.

Behavioural changes take generations to implement and are incredibly expensive, only patchily successful and the minute the imperative for modification disappears the behaviour returns with a roar. look at drink driving. We have no choice really. The democratisation of wealth means we have to seek technological solutions, not moral ones. Human nature means its better to engineer away a problem that lecture people into reluctantly doing the least they can get away with. Green politic ought to be about demanding research into clean nuclear technologies like fusion and subcritical thorium reactors. We need to be exploring how to transition to hydrogen based liquid fuel economy. It ought to be about a vision towards replacing the current earth based extractive mining and depleting of mineral resources like platinum with robotic space based mining of the asteroid belt along with near-earth processing – asteroids are rich in free iron and nickel metal, as well as in the platinum group metals which are rare and valuable in Earth’s crust (about half the world’s nickel comes from one mining area in Canada called the Sudbury Astrobleme where a giant asteroid impacted Earth in prehistoric times. The Sudbury Astrobleme also produces platinum group metals which are separated from the nickel.). We have to develop carbon sequestration technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it underground or in carbonates.

People won’t return to a peasant farming economy, not matter how bucolic and appealing that is to a middle class greens on their lifestyle blocks. Back breaking drudgery in the depths of stygian rural ignorance and isolation is what we want to escape, not return to.

People want cars, computers and the trappings of a consumer lifestyle. We have to come up with ways of sustainably delivering that outcome to all the people of this planet, no simply try and deny prosperity and lifestyle to everyone to “save the planet.”

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Kevyn,

Your summation is 100% right and should be required reading (and understood) by all “young” people.

We were had in those days just like we are being had today.

Notice the call for local bodies to sell their shares in Auckland Airport? Why? So the new owners can morgage the asset to return capital to their share holders. No value added at all.

Another round of Fay-Richwhite style buy ups that we need to repurchase (bale out) in the future.

Sound advice to all young people, live within your means and dont run up any unneccessary debt.

Interesting scenario JH,

But I dont think densly popoulated cities are the total answer. Goods and services need to be transported to them.

The scenario I see is small lot farming close to the coast from where produce can be transported to the city by sail boat.

So while Auckland will be fine, Hamilton will need to be serviced by horse drawn wagon.

Looking way ahead I would be investing in Dutch, Belgium and British draft horse bloodlines to set up a decent stud to produce those big draft horses we will need in the future.

Both for goods transportation and small lot farming.

Plus their meat is just so tasty!!

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An energy shock as ocurred in 1973 (Carless days) is just what we need….

There are still a lot of people out there promoting sprawl “houses are expensive because cities are ring fenced”. Hugh Pavlovich has The Skeptical Environmetalist on his shelves (Press article).
jh

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icehawk, You are probably too young to have lived through exactly the same situation 35 years ago. Commodity prices slumped in 1967/68. Over the next six years they recovered and went on to hit record highs in 1973. The dollar went along for the ride and hit a record of more than $nz1.20 to the $US. The price of oil doubled during this period but the increase wasn’t reflected in petrol prices. Then in late 1973 commodity prices crashed and the price of oil went through the roof. Suddenly we had a balance of payments crisis and the government paniced. The government suddenly stopped local authorities from borrowing money and insisted existing loans were paid off as quickly as possible. The immediate result was rates increases with no increase in services. The long term result was deferred investment in infrastructure upgrades and a reluctance to borrow. Todays ratepayers are paying three times over for this panic reaction. Once in the cost caused by inadequate infrastructure (ie traffic congestion), secondly to pay the cost of building the infrastructure at todays construction and land prices (equivalent to what they would have paid in interest), and thirdly to pay for the capital investment for infrastructure to meet the needs of future ratepayers. The latter is the consequence of changing from Vogel’s public works loans scheme to a pay/go system of funding. Essentially this was presaged when the petrol tax completely replaced public works loans as the source of funding for highways at the start of the great depression, and that scheme fell victim to the high inflation rates after WWII and after the oil shocks.

So, yes, we should be afraid, very afraid. Afraid enough to reduce our own levels of indebtedness while we still have jobs or profitable businesses and not wait till we become victims of the pending crisis (I’m one of the lucky ones, 12 months should see me debt free).

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There is an interesting semi-fiction, semi-documentary movie called “2013: Oil No More”, produced in France. The thing to be most scared about isn’t not being able to drive your car, its getting the next loaf of bread on your table. A lot of modern agriculture is now dependent on oil in one form or another.

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Sachi and Sachi will have to come up with a solution quick.
jh

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