The BP Boycott Starts Here
I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told.
But nonetheless, we live in Los Angeles, so we have 2 cars. One Honda Civic that sees a fair amount of road time, and one Ford Focus that sits unused 300 days a year. It’s kinda like having a spare bedroom for the 1 week a year when your parents visit. Ever so often, I’ll have to drive somewhere to meet Sarah or run some errands on my own. But really, I could accomplish pretty much 95% of the things I need to do with a bike and a tiny bit of motivation.
Today was one of those days that I needed the car and the car needed gas. This only happens about once every two months, on account of how seldom I drive. I had one rule when it came to getting the gas: do not buy from BP. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with the news. Have you heard about the news? It’s an information-distribution system whereby you can learn about things that are happening in the world. Sort of like a sitcom, but real. If you have heard of the news and you watch or read the news, then you probably know that there’s some kind of oil disaster happening right now. And BP is the company responsible for this oil disaster.
Now, let’s get one thing straight: all oil companies are evil. Oil is evil. It’s what they call a “necessary evil,” because no one has taken the time to establish an alternative system to extracting it from the ground and using it to power things. These alternatives do exist and could, with relative ease, be implemented to make the use of oil less necessary — “relative ease” in terms of, say, “wiring the entire country for electricity,” mind you, not relative ease in terms of choosing between butter and margarine at the grocery store (team butter, holla!) — but as of this writing, plans to implement these alternatives have gotten about as far as the nacho delivery service dreams of a hungry stoner. We’ve known for quite some time that oil is evil and dangerous … decades, even … but we have still not put much effort into fixing the system for reasons that are unclear to me but probably have something to do with Americans’ innate distrust of things that are natural and people who remind them of hippies.
The point that I’m getting at is, I don’t know that BP is any worse than Shell or Valero or any of the rest of them. The process of removing oil from the Earth and turning it into energy is messy and hazardous and should come to an end. The BP disaster just happens to be a particularly nasty example of why this process is a bad idea. But regardless of their relative evil in comparison to other oil companies, they are still the current leading representatives of a Thing that is Quite Bad, and therefore, they deserve to be made an example of. This oil spill presents people like me who are not particularly fond of the oil-into-energy system with an opportunity to have a small say in what happens when companies do egregiously bad things to our planet. That small say comes in the form of a boycott.
Theoretically, anyway. I had one rule this morning, and I broke it. I did not break it knowingly. Well, not at first, anyway. I pulled into the Arco gas station, stuck my card in the card thing, agreed to pay the $.45 fee for using an ATM card (further evidence of evil), and began to pump my gas, when I noticed a little sign on the pump that said something to the effect of “Arco, a division of BP.”
If I was a committed activist, I would have immediately taken the hose out of my gas tank and driven elsewhere. But I did not do this, because I was already in the middle of filling up my tank and did not really want to go through the whole process over again. Note: as I mentioned earlier, I only do this process about once every 2 months. Moving to another gas station would have tacked an additional, at most, 5 minutes to my commute. On top of that, there was another gas station right across the street.
There is no excuse for my laziness, but I can try to rectify it by preventing others from making the same mistake. Knowledge is the solution. If I had known Arco was a part of BP, I would have never gone in, and would have never put $40 back in the pockets of the fat bastards who are currently hard at work doing nothing while their giant, unsealable tube fills our oceans full of dead, gelatinous dinosaurs.
Clearly, this BP shit is ridiculous. It’s beyond ridiculous. And what’s even more ridiculous is that as far as I know, there has been no major boycott of this company so far. They are responsible for the single worst environmental disaster to ever befall America, and people (like me) are still lining up to buy their product, even when there is another gas station right across the street. It is insane. If we can’t even stop ourselves from giving the biggest public enemy in America our money, then we are doomed.
Just so you don’t make the same mistake I did, here’s what BP owns. I would encourage you to not give these establishments your business any longer. It’s kind of literally the least you can do.
BP Owned Companies
BP (obviously)
Arco
AMPM
Castrol Motor Oil
Amoco
Also, to at least balance out my idiocy, I gave $40 to the Greater New Orleans Foundation. That’s another remarkable thing about this whole disaster … there really doesn’t seem to be a concentrated place to donate money. I guess it’s because it’s hard to tell just what our money can do … it’s not like we could fix the ocean if we only had enough money. But the G.N.O.F. seems like a respectable organization, and they have kindly volunteered to erase my guilty conscience for a small fee.
The part of this story that is the best part of the story but doesn’t not really have anything to do with the story is that, as I was filling up, the guy at the pump next to me took off with the hose still in his gas tank. I heard a loud “pop,” and looked over to see gas spilling all over the ground. He got out of his car, picked up the now nozzle-less hose, tossed it toward the gas pump, and then got back in his car and attempted to drive away. The BP police managed to stop him and get him out of his car before he could leave the parking lot. He walked toward the office with a smile, like, “okay, you guys caught me.” I would’ve thought it was an act of civil disobedience if he didn’t have such a dumb-looking beard.
I've heard that BP is such a massive global company (profit in the range of $45 million EACH DAY) that boycotts would hurt the people who run the gas stations more than the corporation. Thoughts?
1There are definitely things they do that are untouchable ... like plastic and aluminum. How can you boycott those things? Or how can you figure out which cans and bottles come from BP products?
And yeah, I'm sure the people who run the gas stations would take a bigger hit than BP at first. But couldn't a boycott also encourage the gas stations to jump ship to another franchise? And couldn't they just slap new signage up and get their oil from another distributor? It just seems that argument essentially boils down to: "nothing you can do will change anything." Any change will create unfortunate side effects, won't it? A lot of people are going to lose their jobs if we move to a clean energy economy, too, but I don't know if that's a good reason to keep things status quo.
2It is difficult to really boycott an oil company thanks to the way they operate. All of the gas goes into one pool. If you're buying gas, a percentage of your money is going to BP, no matter where you're buying that gas.
However, you're not wrong about the "they'd have to switch from BP" idea. Certainly BP is getting some sort of money from those independent owners for the "right" to display that name and logo. If they're independent, they should switch asap and stop giving those fees to BP (and maybe sue BP for tarnishing the brand), 'cuz we shouldn't be pulling into any company that we know is owned by BP. This is super easy for me, because I don't know of any BP stations or any of their subsidiaries anywhere in Austin. But still.
Also, Castrol Motor Oil is owned by BP. Not like I buy motor oil very often, but I won't be buying Castrol.
The best thing you can do, though, is to not focus; do everything you can to cut down on your gas use in general. I'm going to try to get back on a bus schedule, even though it's horribly inconvenient from my current house, to cut down on my gas use. If the oil companies want the convenience of pooling their output so we can't boycott any of them, let's work harder to boycott all of them.
3solution in two words: buy a bike and ride it most everywhere you go. walk. take public transit.
you're absolutely right, there's nothing wrong with having a car, but as drivers we must be conscious of how our driving impacts our environment and our community. i really can't think of much good(besides the obvious services: ambulance, fire, garbage, etc) that automobile traffic does for our communities.
boycott started.
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