Don't Bother Boycotting BP

Calls for boycotting BP gas stations are not only useless, they also distract attention from our home-grown failure to shake our oil addiction.

The Brits have worked themselves into a snit over the impudent remarks about BP emanating from the colonies.

It’s tempting to tell our friends across the pond to snap out of it. In the interests of transatlantic comity, however, let’s at least stipulate that calls for boycotting BP gas stations are not only useless, but distract attention from our home-grown failure to begin shaking off our oil addiction.

Boycotting a BP station might make you feel good, but the reality is that the fuel coursing into your tank at each fill-up comes from hither and yon. Refineries accept oil from both domestic and foreign sources, and those sources might vary day by day. Gasoline from different refineries is mixed together as the fuel sloshes through pipelines on its way to bulk terminals, where it is loaded into tanker trucks for delivery to retail stations.

If you visit a BP station, you might not be purchasing gasoline that originated from a BP well. Conversely, if you visit the Brand X station, you might very well be paying for hydrocarbon molecules that BP lifted from the earth. There’s no way for consumers to tell for certain.

The boycott-BP campaign is similar to recurring proposals to require “country-of-origin” labeling for gasoline, sort of like the labels that you see in the grocery store produce section that say the tomatoes came from Mexico or the grapes were grown in Chile.

Come now, we’re told, would you rather give your money to hard-working American roughnecks or to glowering despots like Hugo Chavez, he of the red shirt, or Vladimir Putin, he of no shirt?

The idea is superficial populism and a distraction from the core issue - overdependence on oil is a strategic, economic, and environmental liability that will only get worse the longer we put off dealing with it.

That’s not the fault of BP or any other oil company. It’s ours.