The Great Fuel Boycott of 2007

I know that I wrote about this before in another blog, but it just astounded me how far-stretching this "boycott" went. What I'm talking about is the so-called gas boycotts that were proposed for May 16th and were distributed through all sorts of Myspace bulletins, posts in all manner of forums, and email forwards and such.

There has been a number of gas boycotting bulletins/emails that I've seen in the past few years. Some of them have been aimed at taking away revenues from specific vendors like Exxon or Chevron, while others have aimed to just lower gas prices by taking a 1-day stance against purchasing fuel. None of these "boycotts" have proposed taking a steady amount of fuel profits out of the oil companies' pockets, such as by a continual decrease in fuel usage, yet that's what it would take. If everyone decreased their fuel usage so that the demand was lessened, we'd get a decreased gas price. Oil companies know that one day of bad sales aren't going to ruin them and there's going to be increased sales the day(s) before and after the "boycott" as people find themselves needing to fill up after their day away. Most people don't fill up their gas tanks every day so the profits lost aren't going to be those that would have come from every driver anyways.

What I was really surprised about was the amount of mention that was given to this last proposed "boycott". It was supposed to be yesterday. I first heard it mentioned on KUBE 93.3's T-Man Show. Later, the Q13 morning news weatherwoman, M.J. McDermott also mentioned the boycott, although she said that boycotts such as these 1-day gas protests didn't work to lower gas prices. This call for a gas protest really was a widespread phenomenon this time, unlike past efforts. People were actually talking about it and hearing about it from all different sources and I think people were really expecting a difference to have been made.

While I sold my cars and haven't really been driving, I did put some gas in my sister's car yesterday, after using it in the morning to run an errand.