TP’s Amanda Terkel reports, “As BP tries to shirk responsibility for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, people around the country are spotting some ironic signs at BP gas stations”:
If you can snap similar pics in your neighborhood, send ‘em in.
Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010.″ Read more.
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By squinting, it seems to me that the prices on the BP sign must have three digits in addition the the ubiquitous small 9. It occurs to me that if we are to exchange big spills with little spills we might think about exchanging big cars with little cars. What would happen if you could swap your ride in response to gasoline prices? What if you decided that you would make gasoline a fixed rather than variable part of you budget? Say, at $0.999/gallon (different from the sign) you have a car that gets 15 miles per gallon. Saudi Arabia decides, no, we don’t like that price, let’s make it $1.999 per gallon. Everyone in the US does their (free) car swap and now you are getting 30 mpg. Instead of buying 20 million barrels of oil a day, we now buy 10 million barrels of oil a day. Saudi Arabia needs to keep 10 million additional barrels of oil a day of spare capacity off the market. Since their total production capacity is 11 million barrels a day, they can only sell 1 million. Since it hardly costs them anything to produce oil, they have cut their profits by about 80% by trying to restrict the supply of oil.
We can double our gas mileage for “free” if we do it over ten years, the usual life of a car (we’d be spending that money anyway). The only reason we are seeing gasoline with three digits in the price (aside from the 9) is that we forgot to give Saudi Arabia lots of spare capacity. Now, instead of trading our cars, we could carpool a little more right now and drive the price of gasoline way down while we work on the improved mileage stuff. Rationing a bit now would have a huge stimulative effect on the economy.
Driving in North Georgia the other week, I saw a BP station that made me chuckle. The station’s convenience store was called “Hasty Mart”. Oil spill aside, it’s a very bizarre name for a store. I don’t tend to think of “Hasty” in a positive light and I can’t imagine being happy about “hasty purchases.” Impulse buys – maybe – but hasty? I wish I’d had my camera!
Hope these people weren’t actually filling up at BP.
The great climate irony is that society removes the responsible for “spilling” the fuel the second it is burned.
All that fossil CO2 is the biggest eco-toxic spill in history and we have given ourselves a get-out-of-responsibility-free card for that. We are a looooooong way from even considering climate responsibility it seems.
I see this on The Daily Show all the time. Jon Stewart calls it, “Your moment of Zen.”