SUV Rant - Boycott Oil Companies

Did you know that 9 out of the 10 largest multinational corporations produce either cars or oil? Can you imagine how all that political power shapes what we drive, and how we choose to design our transportation infrastructure? Here you thought you were freely making these decisions for yourself without coercion... think again.

Did you realize how dangerous cars are? I'm on the Lee Vining Volunteer Fire Department, and we get at least as many traffic accidents as medical problems (very few fires). And the vast majority of traumatic injuries and fatalities involve motor vehicles.

Can you imagine a world without the negatives of cars? No traffic accidents, no noise, no pollution, no bad drivers, no road rage, no traffic jams, no vast areas of dead asphalt baking in the hot sun, less urban heat island effect, no roadkill, no oil spills, no corporate genocide in third world countries, no dependence on the volatile middle east, no global warming, no drive-by shootings...

More exercise, fitter people, friendlier people, a greater sense of community, less isolation, more pleasant surroundings, more natural landscapes, revitalized cities, vastly more acreage for public parks and spaces, less greed...

Less mobility.

Oooh, you say, that's bad. Mobility is good. Well, I'd argue that mobility is good and bad. And if we have to take all the bad stuff above in exchange for it, well, I think we might have sold our soul to the devil. Here is your mobility, now I'll rape your environment and culture and steal your happiness and your connection to the land. I'd gladly trade mobility so I can get my soul back--the soul of our landscape and culture. That's one of the reasons why I didn't have a car for 3 years. (I recently got a 91 Honda Civic that gets 40 mpg--I plan to convert it to an electric vehicle).

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to say a bunch of bad stuff about SUVs! Well, SUVs are the worst kind of car, and cars do all the bad stuff mentioned above, so SUVs do really bad stuff. One by itself won't destroy all life on the planet, and it doesn't mean you are a bad person if you drive one (see first paragraph to enable you to blame your buying decision on megacorporations manipulating you and the government), but if everybody drives one, that's bad.

It all comes down to scale. 1 person is wonderful, 6 million people isn't that bad (as long as they are spread out over a large enough area), but 6 billion people is a bad situation, and 12 billion is an ecological crash waiting to happen. 1 small farm is beautiful, 1 huge agribusiness is unsustainable and probably produces a lot of waste and pollution. Small shops are nice, huge mega superstores are ugly and resource depleting. A small fuel efficient vehicle is in the right direction, an armada of large wasteful SUVs is in the wrong direction. And just think of all that money you saved and that you are trading your lifetime to earn being sucked up by those megacorporations. Plop down $40,000 for the car, and over $1 for every slurping noxious gallon of gas bought from oil companies with terrible environmental and human rights records.

If only there was just one oil company out there with a perfect environmental and human rights record, then I would ALWAYS go to them (Hint hint... hello, are all you oil company execs STUPID? There is a huge customer base here looking for responsible oil companies, and if just one of you got smart you could corner this market!). Instead, I searched for ways to drive as little as possible--I didn't want to support the heinous crimes they commit! You can help too!

12/21/03 Note: I realize the boycott suggested below is too complicated to really work on a large scale. I leave it here because it may generate some workable ideas.

Let's boycott gas companies... but since we depend on them, we need to rotate the boycott to make our point. Kind of like Buy Nothing Day, the day after Thanksgiving--you've got to buy stuff, but you can still make a point by not buying anything that day.

So here's the plan. We boycott a different oil company each month. The goal here is to make them notice low sales and maybe consider shaping up. Note that some of the oil companies dispute what some of these Websites accuse them of, but if they were really trying to be good, I don't think they would have to worry about being accused in the first place. We just want them to be good neighbors--to everyone, including the ecological systems upon which we depend. And even if they say something happened in the past and they are good corporate citizens now, well, even if you believe them, they've got to pay for what they've done... it will deter them from doing it again. These corporations have huge amounts of power and influence, so don't kid yourself about their ability to change things if they wanted to.

January -- boycott BP and Oxy for human rights violations in Colombia.

February -- boycott Shell and Chevron for human rights violations in Nigeria.

March -- boycott Shell for cultural genocide in Alaska.

April -- boycott Texaco and Maxus for human rights violations in Ecuador.

May -- boycott Unocal for human rights violations in Burma and Thailand.

June -- boycott Unocal for massive spills (one up to twice as big as Exxon Valdez) in San Luis Obispo County, California, and an attempted coverup (I personally was involved with the county's CEQA process on cleanup)

July -- boycott Arco, BP, and Exxon for environmental impacts in Alaska and pushing to drill oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

August -- boycott Exxon and Mobil for threatening the environment and human rights in Cameroon and Chad.

September -- boycott: Exxon Mobil emissions equal some 80% of those from all of Africa or South America.

October -- boycott: BP Amoco's production accounts for emissions that surpass those of its home country, Britain.

November -- boycott: Oil produced by Shell alone emits more carbon dioxide than most countries in the world, including Canada, Brazil, Mexico, France, Australia and Spain. And Shell and other companies manufactured a pesticide for export to Central America even after its use was banned in the US because it caused sterilization in men.

December -- boycott Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron, members of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), formed to spread the notion that global warming is a dangerous myth.

Cars and SWIFT Trucks are Dangerous
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