BreakTheChain.org
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What a Gas!Date Added: Feb. 15, 2003
The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States were bad enough without considering that we may have inadvertently paid for it. This chain started circulating days after those attacks and resurfaces every time gas prices spike, usually in the spring. They just announced that gas prices were going to jump another 25 cents in a few weeks. Of course, any gas company hearing this will MAKE SURE that it happens, regardless of the price of oil. However, the price of oil from overseas is definitely shooting up again. They pull this every few months. The following information sure beats the idea of not buying gas for one day in protest. Gas stations/companies don't care about one day. They don't make profit based on just one day but over a period of time. If we only patronize those stations ANY DAY that DO NOT buy gas from Saudi Arabia, this will certainly have much more of an impact.... WHERE TO BUY YOUR GAS. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KNOW. READ ON-- Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us! We CAN buy gasoline that's not from Middle East. Why didn't George W. think of this? Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us! The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor. An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS. Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis. Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends. I thought it might be interesting for you to know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from and which major companies import Middle Eastern oil (for the period 9/1/00 - 8/31/01): DO NOT BUY FROM THESE
If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil: Citgo....................0 barrels
All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing. But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of gas buyers. It's really simple to do. Now, don't wimp out at this point... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!! I'm sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it ..... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!! Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next eight days! If you don't like the rising price of gas, here's something quick and easy you can do to help solve the problem This chain first surfaced in the days following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City, and Washington D.C. and immediately appealed to the "if it comes from the middle east, it must be connected to terrorism" mentality of the day. While some more prominent terrorists have been linked in some way to corporate interests, the assumption that all middle-eastern companies are bankrolling terrorism just isn't supported by the evidence. The United States gets its oil from a variety of domestic and international sources. Less than one-third of our oil imports come from Arab nations. In fact, we get almost as much oil from Canada and Mexico as we do from Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia combined. Even when the chain originated in 2001, the data it gave was outdated and misleading. After more than half a decade, the motivating text of the message has changed and grown, but the "statistics" it provides are unchanged from the original. An analysis of DOE data by About.com's Urban Legend expert reveals that in 2003 only three of the stations listed as not importing oil are correctly identified. They are Sinclair, Sunoco and Hess. This chain letter and others like it resurface and regain popularity each year whenever prices at the pump spike. Over the past several years, I've noticed a pretty reliable peak in gas prices each spring, as increased consumption, the switchover at most refineries to warm-weather formulations and other market trends combine to drive prices up. Unfortunately, while they do stabilize, they never quite come back down to where they started, resulting in steady inflation. Most chain letters that try to organize armchair activism attempts over the high price of gas have focused on using our combined consumer power to get prices dropped. This one, however, adds an element of "punishing" those companies that buy oil from the middle east (and thus fund terrorism, if you follow the anonymous author's leap of logic). This is perhaps why this one has proven more popular than the older Great Gas Out and Exxon-Mobil boycott chains. A consumer boycott of only a select group of gas stations (or even an individual) is doomed to failure for a myriad of reasons. First, a boycott of one station would drive business to its competitors. On a local level, this might cause the affected station to lower its prices to lure customers back, but most likely the other stations would raise their prices because of the increased demand. On a larger scale, the companies we would support for using only domestic oil may find it difficult to meet demand with its sources. They would have to expand their sources to keep up with consumption and this may include importation. There is a global demand for petroleum - if a supplier can't sell to one company or country, they'll sell to another. While popular, boycott campaigns that rely only on e-mail chain letters for publicity have been historically unsuccessful. Efforts to "fight" rising fuel prices by changing who we buy from or when date back as far as 1998. However, all of them miss the most effective way to lower the cost of gasoline, which is to reduce demand for it across the board. This would require changing our driving habits and adopting conservation tactics. It's really easy to forward a chain letter, and even go an extra block to gas up, but much harder to take public transportation, ride share, walk more and trade in that gas-guzzling SUV on a more efficient model. Break This chain. References: Snopes.com, TruthOrFiction.com, About.com |