Sustainable WNC

As many of you have no doubt seen, a mass of emails are circulating encouraging us to not buy gas on May 15th. Well, it sounds good, and I sure support it on principle, sadly it is a useless effort in the larger picture.
Aside from some of the urban legends (gas costs dropping 30 cents and so on), the fact is this email effort only means that the gas you don’t buy is replaced the next day, in effect shifting profits from one day to the next. I cannot swear by it, but I did read a theory that it actually INCREASES overall sales a slight fraction, when folks re-fill in the ‘make up’ mode the next day.
SOOOO, rather than point by point bash the emails, I shall assume they mean well, a far better effort would be to NOT USE ANY GAS that day THAT YOU WOULD NORMALLY USE!!, and find ways to use less on ALL days. One day out of 365 is not really very much of an effort. According to the news this AM, gasoline demand is UP 2.5 % from this time last year. If you pledged to use one gallon less per day, that is 365 gallons less in the next year, then we would be talking about making a point.
If we all boycotted Exxon/Mobil ALL THE TIME, such as I do after Valdez adventure, that would make an impact. Inflammatory as it might seem, buying ONLY from Citgo would divert revenue from the Middle East to South America. Yes, we would still be destroying the world with gas/carbon/CO2, etc. but the money would not go to Middle Eastern terror organizations.
The answer is not ‘feel good’ one day boycotts on buying, however nice the idea is in prinicple to some, but the answer is reducing our fossil fuel use dramatically, overall. The answer is in mass transportation (which we sadly lack on any real scale), better community planning (the suburbia shuffle to work, for example), walkable communities, encouraging bike and walking paths, and so on. Say THANKS next time you pass someone on a bike
And just for the record, biofuels (biodeisel, ethanol, etc.) cannot replace the amounts of oil we are using currently, not to mention projected growth. Can’t be done. We MIGHT make a dent in some of the demand with some biofuels, perhaps algae biodiesel, but the bottom line is we have to learn to do far more with far less fuels when it comes to transportation. Hard reality, yes, but them’s the physics.
Peace, Ned

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.