Have you ever wondered how many nukes you've just bought Iran by putting a full tank of gas in your Geo Metro? How about questioning whether you've just sent a car bomb to your old preschool by filling up twice in one week? If you haven't even wondered, then you just aren't feeling guilty enough. A Florida-based group aims to fix all that with the opening of the first "Terror Free Oil" (TFO) gas station in Omaha, Neb. Adorned with the requisite red, white and blue color scheme, the corner-side station provides the warm guarantee of guilt-tripping the hell out of you if you fill up somewhere else.
The station's parent group, Terror Free Oil Initiative, is seeking to etch itself a niche in the big-boy industry of oil by promising customers they can finally purchase gasoline that is not derived from oil exported from the Middle East. If not from beneath the godforsaken sand dunes of our enemies, from where does the oil come? It turns out TFO's main line of supply comes from Sinclair Oil Corp., which claims most of the company's oil comes from the United States or our Canadian neighbors, and a chunk of the oil is bought on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Wait, the New York Mercantile Exchange? Oil bought from the NYME is by nature a mixed bag of crude oil from different countries worldwide that are all put together in a New York refinery. There is no definitive way to determine where exactly a barrel of NYME-bought oil came from. You are just as likely to be buying a barrel of Iranian blood-oil as you are a barrel of red-blooded American pride. So I guess the station should be re-branded as 90 percent terror free, or maybe two-thirds?
Not if you consider the broader scale. Oil is understood to have the quality of a fungible commodity, or in other words, oil from two different sources is considered identical on the open market. The impact of this quality is that if you stop buying oil from the Middle East and buy exclusively from an American oil producing refinery, the unsold oil from the Middle East is simply picked up by someone else, be it China, Japan or Bulgaria. The end result is that the bad guys get their money anyway. This is not to mention that if demand for "Terror Free" oil shoots up, so will its price, which we all know is not a popular move in the United States. The only way to keep the price down would be for the domestic refineries to steadily increase the amount of oil they buy from international sources and thus negate the "Terror Free" label.
What is that you say? We all must be mindful of the consequences of our actions and it is worth the extra cost not to be part of the problem? To that I say, remember Sinclair uses oil from Canada. The same Canada that uses those funds to sustain its universal health care system that provides aid and comfort to those who wish to take part in the cultivation and exportation of the (oh no!) drug marijuana. I'll let you put your head between your knees and hyperventilate for bit while you think of all the kids you just got high.
In truth, the only way to really cut the profits of those who we assume wish us harm is to reduce overall dependence on oil in general and to have other oil-dependent countries do the same to cut demand. By doing so, we can also try to relieve the guilt of the climate change for which we could be responsible, which is a far greater threat than anything the Middle East can muster.
Charles Lim ([email protected]) is a sophomore with no declared major.
