Passing Gas

Fixing a hole in the ocean
Trying to make a dove-tail joint-yeah

~ The Beatles. “Glass Onion”


A lot of anger and ire has been directed at British Petroleum lately, accompanied by impassioned calls for a BP boycott, which strikes me as just a wee bit absurd. It actually strikes me as “naive and hypocritical,” but if I just came out and said that, I’d piss a lot of people off and get myself labeled an arrogant self-righteous asshole. And I’d hate for that to happen.

Boycotting BP, specifically, rather than, for example, getting rid of your goddamn car, implies that people should continue to purchase gasoline at the same rate, as long as they get it from different oil companies. You know, from the good oil companies. The ones that make fresh new oil from recycled old tires and produce that special gasoline that doesn’t churn out carbon dioxide when it burns but rather: patchouli and butterflies.

A friend of mine posted the following link to an article entitled “Boycott BP.” With a title like that, I wasn’t optimistic until I read the first line: “Because it’s much better to give your money to Exxon.” Even with my congenital inability to recognize sarcasm, I suspected that this just might be telling it like it is, not telling people what they want to hear to make them feel good about themselves.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/07/boycott-bp.html

I encourage everyone to check it out. It’ll give you the dirt on every major brand of gasoline with which you might be thinking of filling up your tank and it will effectively eliminate any smug and satisfied sense that you are making a scintilla of difference by boycotting BP. But it can be summed up by one succinct and telling line: “To find the ultimate culprits, look in the mirror.”

I can already feel waves of hatred directed at me, because nothing angers people more than hearing unwelcome, unflattering truths. If you want to annoy people, tell them lies. If you want to enrage them, tell the truth.

Make no mistake: I’m certainly aware that my very existence consumes oil and negatively impacts the environment. I do not for a moment think that I am excused from that comment about looking in the mirror. “Hey, there’s one of those no-good culprits now!” I say. “Handsome son of a bitch, though.” Looking closer I add, “What the hell is that weird zit-looking thing on his nose?” But I digress.

Though I try to buy locally grown fruits and vegetables, there’s no denying that a lot of it comes from far away. The Philadelphia banana crop was disappointingly sparse this year, and I’m pretty sure most of the ones I eat come all the way from South America. They get loaded onto numerous vehicles and motored along to me, burning gasoline all the while. The bad kind. Butterfly free. And though I keep the thermostat low in the winter and I just put in new insulation and I own numerous sweaters that I’m not afraid to use, I’m not about to turn blue in the interest of being green. I burn hydrocarbons to avoid freezing to death. I admit it.

But there is one thing I don’t do (and here is the part where my arrogant self-righteous assholery really comes to the fore, so get those label-makers ready): I do not regularly get into a metal box weighing several thousand pounds in order to transport my 165 pounds of flesh from point A to point B. Moreover, I truly believe that this is insane. There are billions of human beings who do this each and every day of their lives and I think that all of them are insane. Ironically, most of them feel the same way about me, or would if they ever met me. Few of them ever will, which is just as well. We wouldn’t get along.

Where did people ever get the idea that it was normal and natural to do this, to get inside a machine that weighs twenty times what you weigh and move it to move you? Where did they acquire the curious and deadly delusion that it is anything but utterly insane to burn an obviously limited supply of an irreplaceable commodity to do so? Where did they get the notion that moving ourselves around in giant metal boxes was so important that we were willing to contaminate and despoil the planet to get the stuff that makes them go? And where the hell are they all going, anyway? I’ve seen point B. There’s really not much to it. Marginally better than point A at best.

I owned a car for less than a year, back when I was a freshman in college and lived with my parents. The university was a twenty-minute drive away, so I drove back and forth twice a day three to five times a week. But after that first year, I got rid of the car. And it wasn’t just because I realized there was no way in hell I was going to get laid until I moved to campus. Sure, that was the primary reason, yeah. But I also just couldn’t rationalize it any longer. I called myself an environmentalist. I co-founded the first environmental student group on that campus. And there I was getting inside a one-ton metal box that burned dead dinosaurs and spit out poison. I felt like a hypocrite and I was right. I’m still a hypocrite, by the way, but less blatantly so.

I'm always baffled when I see environmentalist bumper stickers on automobiles. It strikes me as about as consistent as putting a “go vegan” sticker on your meat grinder. The automobile is the most anti-environmental device ever dreamed up in the darkest crevices of the human mind. Any quotation from Chief Seattle really ought to sizzle and burn when placed on a bumper.

The irony deepens when “green” folks live far away from population and economic centers, because they like to be surrounded by trees and nature and the happy chirping birds. Unable to abide the concrete and asphalt of the cities, they settle down out in the middle of some remote verdant and bucolic locale, where everything is spread out far and wide: home, work, recreation, and commerce centers, each miles in a different direction, thus necessitating the use of an automobile to do just about anything more involved than using the bathroom. But the car has a “Love Your Mother” bumper sticker on it, so that makes it ok . . .

And it’s probably a fuel-efficient car too, and that’s great. It really is. Credit where credit is due. Fuel-efficient cars are just wonderful. But you know what would be even better? Living, working, and shopping all in the same general area, the way human beings have for hundreds of thousands of years. And no matter how fuel-efficient your car is, it’s still nowhere near as efficient as mass transit, which in turn cannot compare to a bicycle. Not by a long shot. A long eco-system destroying global warming-accelerating shot.

It’s been over twenty years since I had a car and I am confident I’ll never have one again. Human beings as a whole managed to get along without them for a million years, but in a mere century have somehow gotten it into their collective irrational head that they couldn’t possibly live without them. I know that they are wrong. Driving a car is a choice. We all make choices. I make no claims of perfection whatsoever. Sometimes I make choices that hurt the world a little bit for my own comfort and convenience. I’m not about to give up bananas. We all make choices.

You can get in a giant metal box that burns a rapidly dwindling supply of dead dinosaur goo over which wars are constantly waged and which spits out a poisonous gas that is already beginning to choke our planet. But just remember that it’s a choice. It’s not a necessity. And when one of the companies that pulls the poisonous fuel out of the ground spills some, it doesn’t make any sense at all to get angry at that company, specifically, and buy your fuel from some other company until they spill a bunch of it. No sense at all.

Corporations are not people (in spite of an obscene Supreme Court decision to the contrary. (See http://andyrantsandraves.blogspot.com/2010/01/supreme-folly.html). They are utterly immoral entities that exist solely and exclusively for the maximization of profit. There is no point in getting mad at them. Corporations respond only to the demands of the market and, until Republicans get their way, regulations imposed by governments which in turn respond to the demands of voting citizens.

The newsweek article linked above describes legislation that could make some difference. I support it as superior to the status quo, but my support is luke-warm, unlike both our rapidly heating planet and my rage against not BP, but the internal combustion engine itself. If you are upset about what happened in the gulf, supporting the proposed energy and climate bill would do a little bit more than boycotting BP, which will do nothing but make you feel good. Or it might have, before I cruelly ruined it for you.

If you want to make a real difference, get rid of your goddamn car.

Oh my god, Andy you’re such an arrogant self-righteous asshole!

I know. I know.